:: Wog Blog ::

:: WHAT AM I THINKING ABOUT? ::

:: Tuesday 10 August 2004 ::

Gubshite rubbish froma skippy academic....natch

"Envy in a wode brown land" is the article. Crapulous nonsense is the thesis. Slamming Oz and everyone in it is the go, you know. No linky goodness - Fin Review Friday 6 August.

Ahem:
...technologocial progress has led to insufficient emphasis on how we relate to each other..."

"...Alain de Botton's work [Status Anxiety] addresses this lack..."

"...the quest for love...can produce severe anxieties that affect our capacity to find contentment in life...

"...two hundred years of rapid progress has on average made our lives longer, healthier and immensely richer in term of possessions..."

"...Yet given these achievements why aren't we happier than we are? According to de Botton ...in order to feel good about ourselves we need to feel better than somebody else..."

"...A fairly meritocratic democracy maximises the number of perceived equals and as a consequence status anxiety is magnified. Envy is almost everywhere you look..."

"...In a modern meritocracy we are all taught the possibility of 'rags to riches', of successas entirely a matter of effort..."

"...the role of chance in the way society works has been minimised. Australian society is perhaps more afflicted by status anxiety than most..."

"Australia does not have the residual culture or customs of older societies that manage to check modern status anxiety (such as Europe..."..."

WHA'?! NO WOGS? ZIF.

"...unlike America...there is a sense of Australia as an accidental nation that has drifted into prosperity on the bounty of its natural resources. This lack of convincing origins and absence of a sense of mission haunt the Australian psyche. It can be found in a range of attitudes, past and present, including the persistence of fealty to the "mother country" the cultural cringe."

O. So now there ARE wogs. O, but I do not think the author is referring to them. Just Pommy Irish Scots Welsh fealty. So, really, there are still no wogs.

"...egalitarianism...tall poppy syndrome....'he thinks his shit doesn't stink'...lowest common denominator..."

"...Sadly the wealth frenzy in Australia over the past 25 years has seriously eroded the capacity of the egalitarian ethos to check status..."

"...conspicuous consumption..."

"Another reason why Australia is more in thrall to this financial arbitration of status is because we are a migrant society..."

O, so now there ARE wogs. And it is ALL THE WOGS' FAULT!

"...For migrants, money can help measure whether the enormous sacrifices of leaving the familiar for a new life have been worth it. Big houses, nice cars and the success of their children are insulation against and compensation for the loss of language, prople, places and ingrained sensory worlds."

O, but wogs are sad little folks who weep into their pasta and wine of a night time over their terrible loss of little houses and no jobs prospects (helloo, Europe after WWII when most wogs came to Oz.)

And the solution ladies and gents?

Brace yourselves cos you are so gonna retch:

More public ownership.

....

I will let that sink in.

....

Like Gino and Santina used to wake up in the morning sighing and wailing "wither the Commonwealth Bank. And Qantas. And wither my Italianness. My friends who I visit in Italy every year."

Who is the jackass author?

A wog hating skippy academic of course.

Who esle could be such a turd about Oz? Who else could be so profoundly ignorant about wog life in Oz, and how it has nought to do with status - it has to do with getting good stuff that you applaude.

Why buy the $500 toaster - cos it is the best in the world. It heats your toast while you wait to eat it. Why buy an Alfa Romeo car? Because it is a fine vehicle designed by people who care.

This imbecile author, Edward Wright is a stinking marxist jackass who wants us all in little boxes made of ticky tacky, and swimming at the municipal pool, not living in a nice personalised house with a pool in the back cos we like swimming.

His idea of heaven on earth is prolly Le Corbusier's Brasilia [Sooo wrong - Oscar Neimeyer's Brasilia - mille grazie to those readers who wrote to correct me - W], a blasted wasteland of commie patronising architecture that left people helpless even to put up their own freakin' choice of curtains in their apartment cos it would spoil the Totalitarian design lines.

Sheesh. How can this shite be even thought, much less published?

I reckon de Botton is seriously off the rails with this status anxiety thesis. He completely and utterly fails to see that acquisition is an act of applause - it is a declaration of delight.

I buy things cos they are made by folks who want me to like them, and I do sometimes, and that keeps those folks designing, making, which keeps people employed, which enables them to educate themselves or not as they please, and live their lives free from disease and decay, or not as they choose.

I buy things other people own because I share the other folks' view that the things are good and worth having.

I buy things cos they reflect me. I am not a community person. I am me, on my own, living in the community. Everybody acts like me in this way, and we come together every minute of every latitude and longitude sharing what we have and displaying everything that is good.

Edward Wright wants us all wearing little Mao Tse Tung uniforms singing songs to the Beloved Community.

Silly fucker has never watched a World Cup obviously. If he had he would see a festival of community right there. Or just the AFL of a winter's weekend in Oz.

What an empty headed wog hating jackass. He cannot even see the wogs of Oz, living large because this is a great country that they happen to lerv.

He does not even see that it is not envy that builds a wog palace. It is wogness and disgracefully bad Southern Italian bad taste.

And it is not envy that makes a skippy get an architect to build a McMansion as he sneeringly puts it, near The Spit or down at Lorne. It is pleasure in sharing a bit of archiecture...with an architect.

Some people think too much.

And they are not very good at it.

Urgh.


:: WB 4:50 am [link+] ::