If the Sixties and Seventies were all about peace and love, and the Age of Aquarius (incidentally my star sign), then now is the dawning of the Age of Outrage. Oh, the Devil take the 'dawning', it's high noon, well into the day. It seems I cannot turn on my television of late without hearing a group of people have called for the resignation, sacking, or public disembowelling of somebody who has said or done something with which they take umbrage. A few days ago it was David Reynolds. Today it's Geelong mayor Darryn Lyons, whose great offence is to wear a T-shirt featuring a nude of Madonna hitch-hiking, and the slogan something like 'Ass, Grass, or Gas: Nobody rides for free'. The nude is taken from the coffee table book she published years ago, because she was labouring under the misapprehension that everybody gives a shit about what her idea of a sexual fantasy comprises.
You know something? Yeah, I totally agree this is a tacky t-shirt. It is bad judgement for the mayor to wear it, because it's going to attract the cranks. But I support the mayor's right to wear whatever the fudge he likes on HIS time. He was attending an Oktoberfest event on his own time, not a black tie ball representing Council. It was an event where people drink steins of beer and dance the chicken dance, not a charity event or a State funeral, in which he would have attended in an official capacity. This just in: outside their jobs, people have these funny and idiosyncratic things called 'lives'. If he is not accepting paper bags of money, unreasonably elaborate gifts, other bribes, or somehow has his hand in the public till, or if he hasn't committed an assault or an act of menace, WHY do some people have to jump up and down like a frog on a hotplate, screaming for his resignation at the least, because they cannot ask for his head on a silver platter?
I'm not a fan of this stupid t-shirt, but what offends me the most about it is it has Madonna on it. There is not a woman alive who shits me more than Madonna. She is as phony as a three dollar note. She deliberately creates controversy to detract from her abysmal lack of charisma. She tried to appropriate the Princess of Wales' death to make it all about her ('I felt I was in that car with her' ... Oh, puh-LEEEZE!). She handed David Letterman a pair of her underpants and asked was he going to sniff them (who wants to sniff her skidmarked Grundies?), as she swore and smoked a cigar. She kisses starlets of negligible talent on stage for attention. She kissed some more dude not so long back who looked like was going to barf up a bodily organ once she removed her tongue from his throat. She looks for any excuse to show her bum to people (which might make a pleasant change from her soulless face). She did a sucky cover of 'American Pie'. Her singing voice downright hurts my ears.
But given the all the other crap going on in the world, like the anguish of an asylum seeker who had to wait to find out whether she would be given a visa to come to Australia from Nauru for the procedure she needed following her alleged sexual assault; people are worried about an asinine t-shirt?
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