Bogan is an insult that has lost all meaning

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/05/bogan-alex-douglas-clive-palmer

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In 2011 I published a book called The Bogan Delusion; like the author of any screed, I assumed that so reasonable and so nuanced was my argument that I was effectively wiping that slur off the face of the earth. When I revised the book the following year, I confidently predicted that bogans would very soon be relegated to the same retro world as their predecessors, the bodgies and the boofheads. The general elements of this particular Australian antihero – such as anyone could put a finger on identifying aspects – would, I was sure, instead be pushed onto some other general catchall term (I was putting my money on, as much as it turned my stomach, the import "muptard").

But that’s the arrogance of a published author: "bogan" isn’t quite ready to go away just yet. Today, we’ve had the flurry of indignation and exposé around the extraordinary leaked email from Alex Douglas to his now estranged Palmer United Party confrere Marti Zucco about the sinister bogan uprising.

Paraphrasing Jesus, Douglas suggested to Zucco that bogans have now "inherited the earth" and that unlike their predecessors the meek, who he clearly feels they could do well to heed, "the world is full of them demanding their right … to be heard". Perhaps on some subconscious level tapping into an association between Zucco’s surname and the Burger Palace Boys’ Danny Zuko<em>, </em>Douglas added that bogans would typically "choke on a diet of grease". This came in the midst of a bunch of rather inchoate list of disconnected concepts, such as Ugg boots, tattoos, and something unspecified that was routinely dyed bright purple. Palmer happily weighed in soon after claiming he had spent most of his 59 years as a bogan – implying either that he was one no longer or, since the term didn’t really kick in to the popular consciousness until the mid-1980s, that he was an early adopter and still flew the flag.

Palmer’s statement speaks volumes, however baffling its core. It’s all very well for Douglas to make his pitch, which might have easily been some elite muttering a hundred years ago about uppity workers who don’t appreciate fine art: just take out the word "bogan" and replace it with "larrikin". That’s a common enough complaint, it cuts both ways, and it’s typical of an old class dynamic that will live longer than all of us mortals. But Douglas doesn’t know bogans if he thinks he’s captured them with his bright purple, Ugg-booted, Big Brother-watching snapshot. If he thinks he can hide behind an evocation of the name of Daryl Kerrigan – Rob Sitch’s affectionate parody of his own father in the classic film The Castle – as a prototype bogan, he’s missing the point entirely.

Because – as I tried to hammer home in my book – a bogan is whatever you think it is. Bogans aren’t uncultured, necessarily (look at the artist Ben Quilty) and nor are they men of a certain, or any particular, age. They’re not anglo-Australians (as I relate in the book, the adolescent daughter of a friend of mine made a school film about "bogans in love"; the ‘bogans’ in question had a Lebanese background) and nor are they (viz. Clive Palmer, Gina Rinehart, Nathan Tinkler) poor or even working class. Bogan need not be a slur (look at the enormous success of the Bogan and Proud franchise, now available in Harris Scarfe). In fact what it is, is a meaningless term bandied about with abandon but no validity.

The bogan might be a straw man, if it was even a man. It’s closer to a <em>straw</em> – bending in the wind to the direction of whoever’s expressing a foreceful opinion. But when it comes down to it, the bogan has no clothes – not even a bright purple ugg boot. Perhaps it’s time to get out hunting the lesser spotted muptard.

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