The Brownlow, keeping bogan dreams alive.

So it's Brownlow time again and the masses of bogans are salivating at the latest HPOA that some strapping young footy player has managed to convince to hang off his arm for the walk down the blue carpet.  The Brownlow medal ceremony evening is significant for many reasons and an important night in our sporting history.  I know you are thinking "yes of course it is, it importantly recognises the incredible amount of talent our young footballers have" but you would be wrong. Allow me to explain why the Brownlow medal ceremony is really an important part of Australian culture.  Firstly and most importantly it keeps the dream alive for many parents living vicariously through their children at under 14s footy on the weekend that their child may actually have a story on the channel ten news one day.  ACA might even agree to do a feature piece on their child's amazing 'against the odds' struggle to become an elite athlete.  All the swearing, the training, the instilling of hatred for both teammates and competitors will pay off one day with that triumphant walk down the blue carpet.  The second group of people that are happy to see Brownlow time roll around again are the not too bright but ridiculously attractive 'footy babes' that know that if they sneak into enough club functions and training sessions, then they might one day be invited to participate in the waxing, preening, and frocking that is the Bronlow for the WAGs.  There is however the possibility that during the course of becoming involved in the club they will of course be date raped by one of the young football players that hasn't quite worked out that fucking drunk girls after they have passed out doesn't count as consensual sex.  Unfortunately there will be a lack of evidence and she will receive a hefty payout from the club to keep the incident quiet but will possibly end up on ACA herself as part of an expose piece years from now.  But let's not let that detract from the possibility that there is a slim chance that she will one day be invited to the Brownlow medal ceremony night.  The final reason that the Brownlow medal night is an important part of Australian culture is that there is one last dream that it keeps alive.  Brownlow night instills the belief in the promising young footballer that despite having a face like a smashed crab and not being able to string a coherent sentence together without offending several minority groups (see pic),  he might be able to somehow snare a relatively attractive piece of arm bling for the evening.  It goes unsaid that part of this fantasy is knowing that there are teens all over Australia beating off to the revealing picture of her that will no doubt show up in the 'small' paper the following day thereby cementing his status as a football god.  The Bronlow's is all about the hype and surrounding fanfare and if a sport can't be commodified then what's the point really.  It's a shame that genuinely talented people in the public service or the arts don't get the same adulation and spectacle afforded to them. The Brownlow night has become a farce, far from the original idea of a celebration of sportsmanship and talent at the end of the football season.  It has become a competition to get the hottest chick, the most expensive bling, the most revealing dress by the most 'in' designer and let's not forget, it's also about who can get the drunkest.  Far from being a legitimate celebration of sportsmanship and talent it has become a joke of which I am sure Charles Brownlow would not be proud.

War is wrong, fight for peace, revenge for the fallen, I'm confused.

So many phrases have become synonymous with war including the three mentioned in the title.  What I am struggling to understand is how they all fit together to form some kind of coherent moral stance.  Often the same person will say war is wrong, we're fighting for peace, we need to show strength or risk defeat or similar loaded rhetoric.  Almost ten years on isn't it time to review the situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  The image I have published above was selected to make a particular point.  Is revenge a good enough motivation for putting a small child through the horror of war.  It should be included that my google image search of "injured civilians Iraq" resulted in images of a far more graphic nature.  So again, is revenge enough justification for countless civilian casualties and more to the point, what is justification for such large civilian casualties.  The first argument that normally gets thrown up by the advocates of Middle East intervention is that the despotic leader Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power.  Justification for this generally rests on either his supposed stockpile of WMD's or the fact that he carried out systematic genocide of Kurds in the North of Iraq.  We know only too well that the decision was made to enter Afghanistan to kill one man representative of a much larger anti-American sentiment within the fundamentalist Muslim community.  I believe it is important almost ten years later to review this justification as it seems to be a fairly groundless justification for the murder of civilians and children on an almost daily basis.  People need to get involved to send a clear message to our leaders that hypocritical justification for war crimes is no justification.  If removing a tyrant was the agenda then why was Mugabe allowed to continue the murder of innocent people and the oppression of an entire population.  For that matter why did the west not intervene in countless African nations when there was clear evidence of genocide and violations of human rights.  I make this plea because currently there is a need to keep our leaders accountable for their actions for if we do not, we risk one day becoming the group that is persecuted against and we risk that our voice too may one day be the one silenced as we try to scream out to the world for help.  The only way to stop this from happening in the future is to get involved, join campaigns, start and sign petitions, donate small amounts of money to organisations that can have a larger voice than just one person.  Organisations that apply political and social pressure on governments as they continue their agenda of revenge and military aggression for national gain.  Below is a selection of some organisations that are helping keep our leaders accountable for large scale human rights abuses and while we are pointing the finger at developing nations collectively for human rights abuses, sometimes it's good to remind ourselves that our leaders are not infallible either.  

These organisations are some that hold all leaders accountable for their actions and try to hold war criminals accountable for their actions from all countries, not just the ones from the global south.  

http://www.amnesty.org/
http://www.asf.be/index.php?module=home&lang=en
http://www.hrw.org/
http://iwpr.net/
http://www.iidh.org/index2.php?language=en 

Excuse me please, what is a typical Australian?

It is important for humans to define almost everything we come across.  If we cannot define it it makes us uncomfortable and uneasy.  Perhaps the worst kind of social or cultural definition that we can make is a general assumption based on race.  Racism manifests itself in comments and gestures designed to antagonise, exclude or humiliate people with no other basis than biological lineage or the geographic location assigned to one's birth.  As Australians, we are exposed to rhetoric from our leaders almost daily about what it is to be Australian.  Particularly during the recent federal election we were bombarded with comments aimed at 'ordinary working Australians'.  But what exactly is an ordinary Australian?  Is it even possible to define what a typical Australian is?  As you are trying to answer this question with jingoistic notions of BBQ's and hills hoists, consider also whether anybody is actually a typical Australian.  Throughout the course of human history perhaps only the indigenous Australians could even hope to come close to being defined as typical Australians and even then, what would constitute normal behaviour in one cultural group would be quite the opposite in another even though they exist within the same physical continental border.  Or consider also the fact that Poland has actually moved physical location and is now located in a completely different location than it once was.  And consider also that any notion of acceptable cultural behaviour is exactly that, a cultural construction based on an evolution of what is an accepted set of behaviours within a particular society.  So considering all this, if somebody is born outside the geographical border of Australia, and then comes to Australia and exists peacefully with those around them, would you then consider them a legitimate Australian or even typical?  Of course we can! Everybody currently living in Australia is a typical Australian.  An unbelievable amount of different personalities make up this world and it is only when we stop trying to define them that we can hope to live together as people.  It is only when we realise that the notion of nationalism or race in anything other than a biological sense relating to physical attributes is completely false.  The idea that Australians are loyal to their mates is as ridiculous a statement as 'the French are rude' or 'Germans are serious'.  Statements like this seek to homogenise a culture and evoke a sense of nationalistic pride with the goal of perpetuating the idea that the Nation State is somehow an entity in itself.  In recent news in Australia we have seen Sam Newman call a Malaysian man "a monkey", we have seen Stephanie Rice refer to a losing football team as "faggots", a channel 9 cameraman Simon Fuller call a Middle Eastern man a "fucking terrorist" and countless other acts of racism within Australia recently.  The Cronulla riots, the NT Intervention, the way Indian students were treated in Melbourne and last but not least Hey Hey it's Saturday's Blackface stunt all serve to make a statement to the world that Australia is a racist nation.  Even the UN has recently expressed concern that our foreign policy relating to the way Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers were excluded from the process of application temporarily.  We need people to stand up and say to the world that we are not a racist nation and there are many good people here who realise that race and nationality is as flimsy a concept as trying to define countries by drawing lines on a map or trying to sum up a person's whole way of life in a national title.  What we need is people to stand up and say 
Sam Newman, you sir are a fuckwit and you continually try to prove it to us. 
Stephanie Rice, you used an inappropriate derogatory term for homosexuals as an insult and that was stupid.  You need to review your vocabulary (especially if you are going to tweet it). 
Simon Fuller, you are in need of some re-education if you truly believe that someone's ethnicity defines them as a terrorist. 
Hey Hey it's Saturday, your time has passed and four words sum you up - 'shit then, shit now'. 
Everyone must work together to build awareness around this topic because I do not want to live in an Australia where racism is viewed as acceptable behaviour.
People are people and deserve respect. 
Peace.
(The photo was taken in Australia at the Cronulla riots)