Hanson, Palmer and the drongology of Australia’s far right 

Of us, there’s by no means been a greater time to be a dolt and/or a drongo.

We live via relentlessly silly instances, the place Nazi-Boer grifters and sex-pest veneer-dependents are teaming as much as drive the world right into a brick wall over and over, like a Cybertruck full of flammable crash-test dummies and unfastened nitroglycerin. It’s principally Wages of Concern if the truckers had ketamine habits and steered into each pace bump and pothole.

Such is the drongology of on a regular basis life proper now; there’s no escaping it. 

Being, as it’s, the season of lead poisoning, Australia’s far-right dunderhead brigade has seized on this hellish second to lastly go full drongo. This gaggle of unflushables — floaters who’ve principally haunted our political panorama for the reason that early ’90s — are slotting as seamlessly into the brand new silly as they did the previous.

It’s a hustle as previous as time, a sweaty mountebank recreation made all of the extra pathetic and determined by the tragic dagotry of its Australianness. 

The place to start?

A couple of months in the past, Benjamin Letts Dawkins — a former Labor, former One Nation, now impartial member of the WA Legislative Council — legally modified his title to Austin Letts “Aussie” Trump so he might seem as “Aussie Trump” on the state’s poll roll. Aussie Trump was expelled from the ALP after pleading responsible to 35 breaches of a home violence restraining order. Pauline Hanson booted him as a result of he didn’t “go the pub take a look at” in his dedication to the job.

So much has been fabricated from the rise of “the household courtroom dad”, an aesthetic entwined with the far-right’s ascendancy. Elon Musk is maybe the apotheosis of this phenomenon — if maybe too cartoonishly so — together with his skinny-leg denims and crazy-tees 9gag circa-2009 vibe that embodies an “every-second-weekend journey to Sportsbet with papa” power.

Aussie Trump is a distilled, Australian model of this new far-right: gone are the billions of {dollars}, the movie star, the $10,000 hair transplant. As a substitute is a quasi-tragic “background additional in Porridge” actuality, a flip-flop trot to Coles at 11pm to purchase a bachelor’s-handbag narrative that may’t assist however seep via our nation’s shrunken perversity. 

It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic — if this creep issue wasn’t all over the place. 

Mark Latham and Pauline Hanson are the peak of an atavistic type of drongology that has skulked Australia since Percy Reginald Williamson and William John Miles seized the fascist dipshit trumpet within the Thirties. Each have develop into Lynchian tulpas of their roiling inside horrors — faces wrought in gout and constipation, hair and make-up by means of the Harkonnens in Lynch’s Dune. They put on their philosophies on their faces, as each warning and commercial. 

The grotesquerie is in-built by design, at this level. A part of what makes Latham, Hanson and different long-lived Australian jackboots have such an extended half-life is the self-sustaining consistency of their inherent ugliness. A constant product sells, and in case you preserve an aisle on the grocery store referred to as, I dunno, “melted youngsters’s toys with Satanic auras” open lengthy sufficient, you’ll finally discover they’ve an everyday — even keen — purchaser base. 

A lot has been made already of AI being the “the brand new aesthetic of fascism”. Its innate soullessness is a pure draw for these hucksters and their base. It guarantees laziness, and extra excitingly, exclusion and extinction — of artist from course of, and finally society. Naturally, when Palmer launched his Brass Trumpetters Social gathering, or no matter it’s referred to as, he introduced it with an AI brand that seemed like it could seem on a lo-res printed poster for bingo night time at an outer suburban sports activities pub. 

That is the vibe. That is what they’re going for as a result of it’s all they want. They’re enjoying limbo with the bar raised to the ceiling fan — what does it matter in the event that they’re flashing nutsack via worn-out Carman boxers? No one actually cares. 

Such is life within the colonies. The dagotry is intractable. It’s baked into our nationwide identification, our means of being, so these folks can slide by with out friction. 

If I element the one true antidote to such signs I’ll be blacklisted from right here and elsewhere, possibly with good motive. However we have to name an orc an orc in instances reminiscent of these. To equivocate is to offer into it. We’re already as much as our backside lip in shit, do we actually assume that’s a very good time to begin whistling dandy?

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