A short pome about axl rose

If you find your arms growing shorter
As your pockets are getting deeper
Then perhaps it is time to begin
Removing their contents
And placing them on the dresser
Before you next leave the house,
Mate

in d-fens of uh-merica

In Defence of America

America. Uh-merica.

The excesses of American Culture are well-documented and so ubiquitous as to not need seeking out.

They probably don’t need much talking about, either, at least from me.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time with Americans can reel off probably half a dozen cliches about them: loud, friendly, don’t understand irony, insensitive to other nationalities and cultures, and so on. And then are the terrible things that Americans do when they do go overseas: like invading sovereign nations in the middle-east, the far east, and so on, in the name of peace and democracy (to this you might add a somewhat unscrupulous attitude to the regimes of their near neighbours, I suppose). And, you know, setting up Starbucks and McDonalds franchises based on the Wal-Mart business model. Things like that.

But this is not the America that I know. The America that I know has given us Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Dorothy Parker, Martin Luther King, Jazz, Hip-Hop, about eighty per cent of rock and roll, Don DeLillo, Ani DiFranco, Gil Scott-Heron, Hunter Thompson.

At any rate, these are some of the people I think about when someone who is talking to me is complaining about America. I do this because such complaints are often voiced in this country and are so tedious as to not need thinking about. Yes, the War In Iraq is a Terrible Thing, sure, W. is a joke, boy, it sure does suck the big one that our own government are such toadying lickspittles.

Of course, these are all valid opinions, and I suppose that a healthy disrespect about The Great Satan is a good thing in a country like Australia.

At any rate, there are these people, usually in my acquaintance pretty solid members of the bourgeoisie, who are not really in a position to do anything about their grievances, and at any rate are so much a part of the ‘system’ that some part of them has to realise that a strong United States is a necessary but not sufficient condition to their Quality of Life.

And then there are the people for whom talking about all of this is not a joke. I have the greatest degree of admiration for them, and I wish them the best in their continuing struggle against global capitalism and to a lesser extent middle-class values, and whatever else is on the agenda.

But I also wish America the best, too. I hope that it can be a country that lives up to its promise, and that its manifest inadequacies don’t continue to overwhelm the better parts of its nature.

That's great, but what are you gonna call it?

was playing a parlour game the other day, with a bunch of Esteemed Reprobates, and we started talking about what one would call one’s memoirs, should the need arise.

I think I would call mine ‘I Hate You All But I’m Only Going to Blackmail Some of You’. There were some other good entries, to: ‘I Tried Jogging Once, But the Ice Kept Spilling Out of My Drink’ (although it was pointed out that this was actually a quotation from David Lee Roth), ‘The Next Time You Are in Doubt About Self-Immolation, Just Go Right Ahead’, and 'If You Are Reading This, You Will Go Blind'.

Readers are invited to come up with their own.

The entries will be judged by a panel of aphorism experts and prizes doled out accordingly.

A smart arse in a dumb shirt

I just had a bunch of t-shirts made up that say ‘I am not part of your target demographic’. I did this because while I usually find those kinds of shirts irritating on other people, for some reason they make me feel like less, not more, of a tool.

The other thing about them is, when one goes to the gym, fit young people tend to come up and say hello, how about that t-shirt you’re wearing. (Other favourites include ‘I hate your band’ and ‘Your product here’).

Anyway, this post isn’t really about all of that. It is more like an open letter to the Public Relations Industry:

Dear Public Relations Industry,

I believe I can save you a lot of time, and generate some positive vertically integrated efficiencies, by telling how it is that the Young People think about the politicians. The truth is that the average young person regards your standard Aussie pollie with a mixture of indifference and disdain, and more importantly as some kind of manifestation of a hyperaggressive media. John Howard? My gosh, he’s on TV a lot. Just like Anna Coren and those Hollywood starlets. Kevin Rudd? Isn’t he that guy with the MySpace page? God, how frightful it is to actually be asked one’s opinion on something like that … usually when the baby boomers & poll wizards want to get some ‘qualitative data’ about said individuals.

Acutally, the funniest thing I’ve read recently was a short article in the Daily Telegraph about some internal polling that Crosby Textor had done on Christopher Pyne, Tony Abbott, and the pharmaceutical and medical insurance industries. While the latter could be expected to be pretty much universally despised, they actually scored a lot better than the two minister. If you don’t find this funny I don’t know and can’t even tell you why you’ve read this far.

The actual thing about opinion poll data is that, as far as predicting outcomes of election goes, it is about half as reliable as seeing what the bookmakers are giving. There have been serious studies done on this, and if the information were more well known it would have to be suppressed … so my suggestion to you, PR Industry, is to maybe combine the most Satanic of your Dark Arts with the methods employed by the gambling industry.

Aside from the dangers of this combination bringing about the Rapture, there could be some opportunities here to leverage … oh, what the f*ck.

yours,

Evan