The bogan will tell you it likes to think. However, prone to the unquestioning acceptance of prescribed religion and nationalism, its mental faculties are appropriately stunted. Anti-intellectualism the bludgeoning device the bogan deploys against the nerds of the adult world. It affords the bogan the opportunity to validate its poorly-informed opinion on complex issues, by stating that a lifetime of studying the subject at hand actually serves as an impediment to any ivory tower elitist’s analysis. The bogan believes its knowledge of the ‘Real World’ (which is limited to Today Tonight, explosive domestic arguments, and last summer’s trip to Dreamworld) trumps the intellectual’s access to the university’s considerable research resources and decades of wide reading within the field. This is because the Bogan is a moron, but yet can’t stand to be wrong, even about things it only has a passing interest in.
It all started in primary school when the young bogan realised that there were other kids much smarter than itself. This proved rather confusing for it. It could run faster, kick harder and jump higher than many of its counterparts, but why then, could it not successfully multiply fractions or point out Japan on a map? Furious at its own inadequacies, and lacking the self-awareness or discipline to improve itself, the bogan lashed out the only way it knows how. Violently. It would hurl abuses such as ‘smart arse’, ‘nerd’ or ‘teacher’s pet’, alluding to its classmates’ superior intellectual traits, and in the process, convince itself that they are intensely undesirable qualities. After all, nobody else in the class had jumped their dad’s jetski over the top of an unsuspecting swimmer. And it was only nine.
Flash forward some fifteen years. The bogue is gainfully employed in a job that requires it to wear a shirt and tie. The pay is reasonable, the receptionist has a super rack, and it is paying off a McMansion with multiple flat-screen televisions. Much to its chagrin however, it turns out that its manager is like one of those nerds from back in school – someone chosen for their intellectual prowess, and who is therefore a smartarse. This manager not only earns twice as much, but is also seeing the receptionist’s super rack in the sack each night. Again, the bogan becomes very angry. Hatred coursing through its veins, it now decides that it loathes everything that has made the ugly nerd rich and successful. What follows is a lifetime of abject hostility and derision towards education, philosophy, literature, art, science, and anything else that it doesn’t choose to understand. The bogan defiantly disregards these things as impractical and pointless, as its practitioners are a bunch of poofs who are oblivious to the bogan’s x-tremely real world.
