Where is the gonzo?

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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