Thursday, March 25, 2010

Making the Australian unconscious manifest

There was a police show on tv the other night, a reality based thing, and one story that was followed was 3 immigrant youths who had attacked a homeless man and filmed the attack on their cell phone cameras. The brown skinned, quite diminutive youths seemed to be immigrants from somewhere (Indonesia?/Malaysia/ East Timor ?/ Pacific Islands?) who had, I imagine, grown up in Sydney's West and spoke standard West Sydney working class immigrant English.

White police officer: You should be ashamed of yourselves
(Tranlation: I'm white, and I'm ashamed that the homeless man is also white and a drunkard or mentally ill an unkempt and dysfunctional and seemingly powerless)
Youths look suitably contrite, make noises about how they just did it so that he would leave them alone
(Translation: if we look like this, maybe the powers that be will feel sorry for us, and won't hurt us too much, now that we were stupid enough to get caught and to have filmed ourselves doing it, so we must put on our sorry faces)
Police officer: a vicious and unprovoked assault on a homeless man
(it could have been me, too many of these fukkers coming into the country, they're trash)
Youths: we didn't mean nuffink..just to scare him a bit
etc etc

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