The modern world sucks. You suck. Every one of my audience members is to blame. So fuck you all.
Everybody is a f*n journalist and nobody can write for shit. Consequently, we have all become accustomed to wading through endless reams of tiresome bullshit, about tiny subjects, on a daily basis. It really is dire. The journalistic landscape in Australia is Mad Max bleak. Just reams of grey nonsense.
Where is the passion? The astonishment? The earnest expression of total amazement?
We are currently living through the dissolution of the great post WWII American hegemony. Cultural walls are crashing down and political certainties have been abolished. We have entered a period of great upheaval and personal and social dislocation. But where are the great chroniclers? Who is doing more than generating content? Who is sucking up this idiocy and outrage and spewing out the same discontent and confusion we are collectively experiencing? Who is screaming that this is not fucking alright?
The great gonzo journalists warned us this time was approaching. Now we are swallowed by a maelstrom of boring disinformation, yet the only scribblers that remain have failed to notice. They continue to write about how the ABC is, or is not, a hotbed of communism. Or how Albo is perceived to be weak. Or nuclear power. Or some other incredibly sincere and unutterably boring shit about nothing that is either interesting or fucking important – even as the waves of foreign crazy and chaotic crash against the ramparts of our scant emotional defenses.
We have entered an information epoch in which information, misinformation and conspiracy narratives are all credulously consumed by an ever-outraged audience. It is a post-truth world. Which might be cool if it was not also so uninteresting and deathly dull. So unutterably and unbearably dull, and oh so, so so boring.
While outside of the press, reality has taken a holiday. Everything has been transformed into a technicolor kaleidoscope of ludicrous activity. On the South Lawn of the White House the President of the United States settles into the front seat of a Tesla and looks around. ‘It’s all computer’ he states, while shaking his head in amazement. Next to him Elon Musk, the master of the known universe, looks as if he is passing a kidney stone.
So where are the gonzo voices chronicling at least one or two aspects of our collective astonishment? Where is the struggle for relatability? Where are the loud expressions of utter disbelief? Fr’ fucksake – the President of the US just threatened to squash the economy of Canada unless it becomes the fifty-first state!?! That deserves at least one or two fr’fucksakes and huugely exotic punctuation. Doesn’t it? If not now, when?
If nothing else, one or two professional commentators do need to occasionally notice that a fair proportion of the population of America are currently rolling around on the ground laughing and crying in alternative fits and starts, while another segment is gathering into small packs who appear to be sharpening pitchforks. Meanwhile, domestically, our journalists continue to concentrate on corrupt trade unions and the start of the new football season. Which are surely matters that are momentous to the few punters who are not suffering too badly from emotional whiplash and existential fading. Also, it would be helpful if someone could explain why the whole of western civilization seems to be flashing on and off occasionally.
Over the weekend the American government decided to roll back the habeus corpus protections provided by Magna Carta in the early twelve hundreds. Despite being ordered not to do so by a court, the Trump administration flew 250 people to another country and just dropped them off there. Right.
So where the fuck are the twelve point headlines? Are they saving them for an asteroid impact?
When I noticed this news my hair began to bleed. I felt like I had just walked in on Geoge Bush and my own mother screwing on my marital bed. But the ABC news reader didn’t even scream? How very odd. Which is all a good advertisement for gonzo. Oh, gonzo, where are you my love?
Gonzo journalism is about drugs, ugly ideas, pretty words and a bunch of aspirational bullshit. But most of all it is about real reactions to the shit that is actually going down. By putting people and their weird proclivities back into the unfolding drama of what the fuck is going on, gonzo practitioners grab an audience by the gonads and drag them along for a wild ride though a shared reaction. It might not provide for much of an accurate dissertation. It might be filled with swearing, genitals hanging loose, and impossible events in outrageously interesting places, but it’s real. It is even super-real.
Gonzo journalism is also about gratuitously insulting the right-wing press. Lots. Just on principle. Frequently. These people have already taken over the western world and are presently dismantling our civilization, so insulting them lots, very regularly, cannot be a bad thing. It certainly can’t make things worse. More importantly, it is what the audience thinks, wants, and demands. It might not really qualify as ‘journalism’ in the strict sense of the word, but it is desperately needed to counteract the drear and supposedly balanced bullshit that currently suffuses our existence.
A thirty-four times convicted President of the USA takes over the Justice Department and wages an unlawful crusade of retribution upon the FBI, the legal profession, particular journalists, and anyone he believes may have slighted him, yet there are no psychedelic descriptions? Nobody wants to mention that he is babbling a thousand strains of crazy and looks like a badly smeared oil painting of himself? Nobody has bothered to mention his supporters seem to be simultaneously incredibly gullible and well-armed and dangerous? Or that civilization is a group effort that may be complicated by a billion weapons in private hands and everybody hating everybody else?
Plus, fuck you, Gina. This is a purely gratuitous insult but I feel it well-deserved.
I also express a wish that every newsreader would pause every ten or so minutes to scream a random insult such as ‘Murdoch is a cocksucker’ or ‘Dutton is a tool’ or ‘Trump looks and acts like a clown’. Of course it would be counterproductive. But it would be satisfying and would likely rate far better than the shit we are being served up right now.
Now, what was I saying?
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“We are currently living through the dissolution of the great post WWII American hegemony. Cultural walls are crashing down and political certainties have been abolished… Who is screaming that this is not effing alright?”
Of course it’s alright.
I think it’s great.
People will finally wake up to the fact that the System is just an illusion, a lie, a confidence trick that is harmful to their health and well-being.
Well Jim, I thoroughly enjoyed that well justified rant,but you’ll never see anything like that in our died in the wool, horse shit media,you’d risk burning at the stake for even going near the truth.”A lucky country run by mainly second rate people”..if only.
I hear you, James.
re. the “[the] endless reams of tiresome bullshit, about tiny subjects”, I blame, in no particular order, the internet, the 24hr news cycles, social media, the Murdochs, along with a generalised dumbing-down of the journalistic class who for reasons mysterious have swallowed the Kool Aid and decided trivia and non-news is actually all it takes to be a journalist… viz., just write shit, shamelessly, with complete disregard to the principles of professional reporting – context, accuracy, lexical and grammatical correctness, meaningfulness etc. etc. – all of which has aided and abetted the inexorable and accelerating downward slide into the pits of hell and damnation. Stick a hundred, or even a thousand so-called journalists into a bunch and you’ll be hard put to find two or three worthy of the title. The rest…poseurs, hacks, spineless lackeys writing propagandist tripe in return for their weekly paycheck.
And, by and large, given the Darwinian struggle just to get by in these dog eat dog days, and the overwhelming nature of the constancy of dross flooding the air waves and internet, the passion, the astonishment, the earnest expressions of total amazement have taken a back seat, like the burr of the suburban lawnmowers, chainsaws and leaf blowers, it’s just another annoyance to be ignored.
The people who populate the current journalistic universe would not be recognised as such by the likes of H.L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, Arthur Koestler, Christopher Hitchens, Eric Blair aka George Orwell, or locally; Mungo MacCallum, Donald Horne, Clive James, Paul Lyneham, Alan Ramsey, to name but a few amongst the most august of that profession.
Have you caught up with Jasmine Crockett?
She is the only US lawmaker currently making any sense.
https://youtube.com/shorts/sAP3XOsDNf0?si=gYwOQlleXZF85_yI
Weeping wounds, bleeding botties, bulging bladders, thrashed throats, journalists today…the poor buggers who have to work under strain for shitheaded Merde Dog or the new perverted profiteering predatory proprietors of no intellect, decency or honesty, scribbling shit for a Bezos (spew) or a Zuckerberg (vomit) or a MUSK MAGGOT, (projectile diarrhoia) or the old arseholes like Black or Maxwell… what an effing world of filth, misinformation, lies for loot, muck for money, whoreing on for…what?? Suckers read this shit and it comes back to elect a Trump. TRUMP? WORMSHIT IN HIGH OFFICE?
Well said James!
Yay!
Today 18Mar, just heard that her Dutts had promised a referendum to change the Constitution to facilitate the expulsion from Oz of dual citizens.
Not a blink of astonishment, no comment on the multiple hypocrisies, not a comment on the bleedingly apparent racism, no questioning of his intended purpose. Nothing but vanilla zilch, allowing such propaganda to pass through to unthinking idiots and the ever more frightened new constituents of Oz multicultural population.
He says he “wants a poll” … Will the polsters oblige with carefully crafted and guileful questions? Perhaps he really needs a pole, to help him navigate the sewer he inhabits.
Nothing surprising in that, Clakka. The media fail on many counts, as well-expressed in James Moylan’s recent Where is the gonzo? essay.
Expect vanilla zilch to furnish us with such spicy treats as ‘Dutton has sex with goat while his 2IC films it and uploads to Tik Tok’, or ‘Barnaby Joyce off the wagon as he resurfaces after a ten-day bender in Bali’, or even the disturbing ‘Alexander Downer revealed to be John Howard’s secret lover after photos emerge showing ‘Fishnets’ in drag performing fellatio on the octogenarian’. All stories presented without additional commentary, as if they were simply the norm.
I am eternally torn between naive optimism and despair that even the best of our shared concepts such as ‘justice’ are illusory.
So my doggerel and poetry reflects this – as I read through my archives I get emotional whiplash and sometimes do not even remember the person who could write such a piece.
oil and tears (c2003)
the whole world will change
every day a new landscape
each night a new dream.
in the bare desert
the wind will shift a huge dune
one grain at a time.
hungry (c2014)
I was hungry for some justice – the best that I could find,
perhaps a pound of jurisprudence from a great judicial mind?
I started in a ghetto
in a forgotten broken mile
it was full of squalid little hovels
and here I shopped a while
I bought a sixpence worth of sympathy
and three pennies worth of tears
a carry-bag of misery
and a basket full of fears
then two dozen long excuses
came so very cheap
so I bought them all unthinkingly
and then went home to sleep
I was hungry for some justice -the best that I could find,
perhaps a pound of jurisprudence from a great judicial mind?
I went searching in a shopping mall
so invitingly secure
there was muzak all around me
and a welcome on the door
and everywhere was shiny
and they were all so very nice
and any justice you care to name
could be bought at any price
but upon awakening next morning
I found to my surprise
I’d bought a trolley full of promises
and a long receipt of lies
I was hungry for some justice – the best that I could find,
perhaps a pound of jurisprudence from a great judicial mind?
So I called upon my chauffeur
and informed him I would dine
then I bought a brace of issues
and some fine expensive wine
And the Club was full of bonhomie
an absolute delight
we partied all that afternoon
and well into the night
and imagine my astonishment
when I awoke upon a cloud?
an Australian in paradise?
it makes me feel so proud
thank you all for paying attention
JM
Gonzo is going the way of the dodo.
I did so enjoy the original Gonzo, Hunter S Thompson and the wonderful illustrations by Ralph Steadman.
The irreverence to make politicians cringe.
I think if anyone tried that on Trump their life would be shortened very quickly.
re. James Moylan’s lament at the lack of gonzo journalism in the current zeitgeist, Van Badham’s piece in today’s Guardian perhaps, if not actual gonzo, comes somewhat close to qualifying for that prized recognition. Gonzo nepo, maybe. Worth a read, imho.
Steve:
Of course it’s alright.
I think it’s great.
And fuck everyone who suffers as a result, right? Because it’s not like they’re real people, is it? Not like they matter …
Cactus. Sideways. You’re as bad as the people doing this.