So I have a confession to make. I have failed. In a number of areas. It wasn’t intentional. It certainly wasn’t optimal. But it is what it is. But this isn’t the worst fail. There have been some far more epic fails. I will attempt to summarise these.
In the first:
What the fuck is going on with the weather? Who honestly believes that global warming is to blame for this? The weather service has literally thrown up their hands and said “Fuck it. We used to just get drunk and throw darts at post‑its with weather predictions on them but now it’s literally anyone’s guess.” Global fucking warming! Are you high? Yes, we are poisoning a bunch of stuff with our carbon monoxide emissions and so forth but anyone with access to En‑fucking‑carta could tell you that one volcanic eruption spews forth more carbon monoxide and associated poisonous shit than humanity has managed to create in the entirety of our furious industrial efforts. We are in the midst of a cycle of the planet. Get busy living or get busy dying. Certainly words to live by. Thank you, Morgan Freeman. And Stephen King.
And why don’t we have movies of that caliber any more? In point of fact we just don’t have great iconic movies any more. Encapsulated moments of greatness that touch our hearts and enrich our souls. Instead we get odes to better eras that manage to miss the point of earlier eras. Remakes of movies that fail to understand what the original was about and end up being infomercials for whatever company gave the most money to the production. I WATCH FUCKING INFOMERCIALS AT 3 IN THE MORNING! I don’t need to spend fifteen fucking dollars to see yours too. I want to see insight into the human soul. I want motivation. I want escapism. I don’t want to see Jason Statham masturbating furiously with an Audi glove for an hour and a half. For God’s sake the man is just not that talented. Who in their right mind actually believes him to be a sex symbol? Or a symbol of anything for that matter? How does Jason fucking Statham encapsulate anything at all about the homosexual community as a whole? I would dearly love someone to explain that to me. Admittedly he is a very shapely man. He has a gravelly voice that only a true Londoner would be able to dredge out of a back alley dumpster. But how does a man who has publicly stated that he is not gay—not that he has any problem with gays, in fact some of his best friends are gay—how on Earth does he become an icon in the gay community?
But enough of this. This is not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk to you about failure. Your failure, in particular. Victoria students, what happened to you? I mean honestly. Egg throwing from some faux disaffected knobhead fronting for a party of people who sit in their parents’ third holiday homes smoking Galloises and discussing how truly and profoundly they understand the workers’ struggle, though God forbid they should ever actually get their hands dirty. Is this really what protest has come to? And for another thing, how come the response to anything is completely apathetic? Your Face‑fucking‑Book status is not an effective means of communicating with the world at large. This is because it only gets seen by the people you know and are probably friends with. Surprise sur‑fucking‑prise, your friends are probably going to agree with you. They certainly won’t challenge you in any meaningful way. This means that essentially you are standing in a polished steel room, shouting your opinion and listening to the echoes; and you think this is making yourself heard. That was quite a clever metaphor if I do say so myself. Do you even know what a metaphor is? How did it come to this Victoria? I mean honestly, even those clinically retarded afterbirths in Dunedin managed to raise their public profile. Admittedly in keeping with their status as terminal lobotomy patients they did it for reasons best summed up as childish. If the child was pathologically abused and had serious ADD and access to matches and vodka. There are so many things that are worth shouting about. Why do you just keep your head down and mutter under your breath about how things would be different if someone listened to you? When else will you have a chance to say all the things that you have come to profoundly understand about yourself and the world around you? Jesus, even if all you have to say is “I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY YOU FIND THIS SO INCREDIBLY INCENSING!” just say it where they can hear you. We are in the capital of our country here. If we can’t affect change in our surroundings here, how can we expect it to go any better for the rest of the country?
And while I’m on the topic of politics may, I just say what a fucking fail of a year it has been there. Biggest exposé of the year? The Minister of Foreign Affairs has the biggest expenditure list. Really? The guy who flies around the world with his staff, keeping up appearances with other countries, spends a lot of money on air travel? Fuck me, I figured they got issued wings when they took that office. Bring on the genetic engineering, I’ve found a brilliant application for it. Second biggest scandal, Taito Phillip Field getting busted for improperly declaring illegal immigrant labour. Wow. How backwater are we? In the States this shit wouldn’t even be an issue. Hell, that’s what illegal immigrants are for, right? If they were legal immigrants they would have real jobs. Do some fucking digging! We must have some interesting shit going on in the halls of power. What is the point of a free press if we don’t use it to ask the hard questions? Find the scandal in the halls of power!
I feel I may have misrepresented myself. I think on the balance my fails are fairly modest. I reckon you lot are the definition of fail whales. You hold in your hands a magazine that is more than happy to reprint nearly anything you want to say and yet the letters page has constant correspondence from sufferers of foetal alcohol syndrome (Mike the Courier) and notoriously self-obsessed narcissists (Mike the Courier). At the very best it could be imagined that they are snide in-jokes bandied back and forth by snobbish literati attempting to fill the void left by your apathy. So here’s to you, Victoria students. Cheers to failure on a scale that, while it may not be cataclysmic, it can certainly be seen it on a fine day. When we have one.