Self-obsession and malevolence, not alcohol, is the key

David Penberthy
19 January 2014
Sunday Herald Sun
THERE’S a new ugliness in our culture which didn’t exist when I was young. It’s poster boy seems to be an inked-up, pumped-up, mixed martial arts-loving gym junkie.
He is a lover of social media and has turned his dopey little corner of the internet into his personal shrine. He’s probably posted an endless series of snaps and selfies flexing his pecs and showing off his tatts in a ripped muscle shirt.
He’s a bloke who didn’t go to my high school. None of us who went on to university acted like him. Not one of my friends who left school in year 10 and year 11 to become a tradie or work at the local car factory acted like him either.
He is a new Australian man.
It appears to be mandatory to describe the random, mindless violence we have seen in pubs and on footpaths around the nation as “alcohol-fuelled” violence. I hate this term. A more appropriate term would be scumbag-fuelled violence, as the focus on alcohol lets the scumbags off the hook.
There are tens of thousands of Australians who frequently engage in what those abstemious folks in the health lobby describe as “dangerous” drinking. They do so without sending anyone to hospital, or to an early grave. I am one of them. So is almost everyone I know. For me, “dangerous” drinking brings with it the risk of winding up in a karaoke bar and singing a woeful version of Air Supply’s All Out Of Love or having a savage argument with my mate Darien about the result of the 1978 SANFL grand final. This is the kind of thing which happens to the overwhelming majority of Australians when they drink to what the experts call “dangerous” levels. They end up having a dangerously good time, where the only real danger is that somebody might die laughing.
The current emphasis on the availability of alcohol, on alcohol advertising and sports sponsorships, and the mindless persecution of publicans who have a vested (and demonstrated) interest in preventing violence on their premises … it’s largely a load of exculpatory nonsense which elevates the role of external factors and lets flawed individuals off the hook.
Excessive drinking has always been with us. The nation was founded by some of the world’s most accomplished pissheads. The die was cast that night in or around 1788 when they decided to let the female convicts ashore and the blokes broke into the rum supplies, and Sydney’s first street party erupted down by the Tank Stream.
The statistics suggest that something has changed in the past decade, with 91 deaths from coward punches since the year 2000. Blaming alcohol is a cop-out. The people who deserve the blame hail from that moronic new breed of man described above.
For what it’s worth, my rat fur-lined theory is that three things have changed since I was at high school and starting out with grog. One involves the vain and vacuous world of social media. Another goes to the increasing use of steroids and methamphetamine. The third is the influence of bikie culture on the cultural mainstream.
For all its upsides, one of the defining features of social media is its absurd level of self-absorption. The he-men of the past had only a mirror in which to admire themselves, a bit like Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
Nowadays they can find equally feeble-minded narcissists in cyberspace where they can boast about their physical prowess, be it their ability to cut their heads open by crushing a beer can and withstand the pain, to put the gloves on and lay into the heavy bag at the local gym, or in the worst cases, to chronicle their own acts of violence or vandalism towards people and property with stills and video.
Many of these blokes also fit into the second category of being both pumped up on steroids and jacked up on speed. This week I interviewed a drug and alcohol researcher who said one of the emerging (and urgent) areas of research went to the interplay between booze, speed and steroids, and the subsequently aberrant behaviour of those who were taking this insane cocktail, perhaps on account of sporting a pair of ossified testicles though their habitual steroid use.
Give me two stubbies of Cascade, four glasses of shiraz and a Beam and Coke any day.
The third point can best be illustrated through the way in which a lot of these blokes carry themselves and choose to dress. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that having a tatt or wearing a certain outfit makes you a violent person. If you want to get a tatt, good luck to you. But if you look at these blokes, they can often be found aping (an apt word) the sort of “hard-casual” look affected by the bikie gangs, with the neck and face tatts, the G-Star Raw tees, deliberately one size too small, and most tellingly of all, a weird way of walking from side to side with their arms formed in triangles, as if they’re ready to punch pretty much anyone, anywhere, any time.
It’s because they are.
Our nation was once largely comprised of genial, drunken boofheads who were most at risk of passing out in a mate’s toilet. You would measure the success of a night on the turps by how much fun you’ve had. Sickeningly, for this new breed of blokes, you measure its success by the number of strangers you’ve belted.