14 November, 2016. 13:34
ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
FOR THE MANY THOUSANDS of young Australians who spent long hours, often late at night, on the frontlines of the Great Meme War have been officially recognised by the Returned Services League and are now eligible to join their local club.
The move comes after Donald Trump’s victory was partially attributed to the quality and quantity of neo-conservative memes coming out of internet imageboards such as 4chan and Reddit.
However, some existing members of the RSL have criticised the move, saying that it wasn’t a ‘real war’, per say.
“You can tell me that playing with pictures of a green cartoon frog carry the same weight as me, for example, who had to bayonet, machine gun and stack scores of Korean and Chinese teenagers in order to be called a war veteran.” said Campbell Greenholm, a Korean War veteran and president of the South Betoota RSL Club.
“I’ve honestly shot people dead, slit throats, you name it. I’ve taken human life. I still see their faces from time to time. Whether it be in the supermarket, in my dreams or even in the ones I love. Not that the government cares about people like me who can’t seem to sleep anymore.”
“But now you’ve got these neck-bearded manlets walking around the club in Pokemon tee shirts. Hell, the Meme War representative has a smashing pair of tits on him – and he’s supposed to be a war veteran. All I can say is that I’m glad I’m 93.” he said.
However, some of Australia’s newest veterans have hit back at the old guard, saying they weren’t there and won’t understand the intricacies of a strictly online global conflict.
Shayne Economos was raised below the line and found solace from schoolyard bullies in online communities that are now being ‘blamed’ for a Trump victory.
Making memes, often overnight, from his late model caravan on the outskirts of Betoota, the 23-year-old chinless Mi-Goreng disposable unit was on the coalface of meme technology throughout the conflict.
“I may not have cracked a Korean bloke’s head open like a pistachio nut, I may not have burned a handful of Japanese people to death with a flamethrower – but I did influence a US election.” he said.
“It was tough out there, we lost a lot of good memers along the way. Some just grew out of it, others got girlfriends. The real heroes never made it back.”
Dear Sirs,
As a Western Australian and a veteran of numerous skirmishes against a despised enemy, I am delighted that you are finally giving serious page time to lesser-known battles and the heroes who waged them, but dismayed that you maintain this egotistical eastern-states focus. I don’t know this Donald Tramp chap myself – politics hasn’t really been of interest to me since good old Sir John Forrest gave it away, and a long line of simpering ninnies and no-hopers superseded him, but I’m pretty sure the man in question has played no measurable part in the ongoing, co-ordinated GST attacks against my homeland.
Your readers may be interested to hear of our own home-grown freedom fighters equally worthy of their stories being told. I still clearly recall a year or so after we’d chased-off the blacks here and pinched their land back in ’29, a few of us went to the Governor with what we thought was a jolly good plan. One fellow in the group had done a bit of enforced domiciling at Sydney Cove a few years earlier, and he reckoned the place was ripe for a takeover. He told us all the guns were pointing out to sea because they were wetting themselves shitless about the French, and there was good high ground to the west of town we could ride to, set ourselves up and start shooting, and we’d clear all the bastards out and have it for ourselves before supper time.
Stirling was a complete ditherer, and kept banging-on about how “the Colonial Office wouldn’t be pleased” and insisted on pointing at maps and distance scales and gibbering about it being “a ludicrous impossibility”. The man was a disgrace, and a nightshirt-lifter as far as the men present were concerned, and one of them, old Sid Twomey (who was always a bit of a hothead it must be said) stormed out of Stirling’s tent and decided to try it on his own, bellowing “To hell with what that cross-dresser says”. I heard they found what was left of his remains some decades later when they were building the railway line out to Kalgoorlie, but I’ve never been one to bad-mouth a chap for trying.
The irony of it was that many years afterwards I was chatting about the old days to Governor Broome when he was making a Vice-Regal visit to the sanatorium where I was being temporarily held on a malicious, fabricated charge, and he seemed to quite warm to the idea – although by that stage the moment had well-and-truly passed and there were now too many of the bastards over there to shoot. One man’s vacillating, and the fate of what would have gone on to become the greatest nation in the world was sunk.
Perhaps attempting to wash off the stench of cowardice that had now attached itself to him, that wastrel Stirling got himself personally involved a few years later when the blacks down Peel way started getting a bit uppity and began complaining about us pinching their land and entertaining their womenfolk. “The Battle of Pinjarra” it was called in the history books, but I was there, and it was a bloody embarrassing fiasco let me tell you. Stirling – probably with a skinful of expensive Madeira under his belt – and not for the first time to be sure, charged at the blacks when we’d sighted them with a musket in each hand yelling “Fill your hands you son-of-a-bitch”, which I have to say was perhaps the worst example of pathetic over-compensation I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness. The man was a shambles and a buffoon, and even Captain Irwin was heard to swear “By God, I’ll shoot that fucking arsehole if he doesn’t stop this shit of his, and let the consequences be damned!”
Of course age eventually slows even the most virile of us, and these days I and my associates have to operate more low-key campaigns. I did have a very successful operation at Perth Airport for several days holding up a sign in the arrivals area for eastern-states flights that read “Welcome to Perth. Hand over your GST and then fuck off” before I was issued with a restraining order and banned from being within 5 miles of the Airport. My young great grand-nephew took up the cudgels after my arrest, but unfortunately misread which gate the Melbourne flight was arriving at and ended up badly beaten and then hospitalised when he mistakenly flashed the placard at passengers getting off the plane from Paraburdoo. I should add that he’s come on quite well since, and can now take nourishment in the form of chicken noodle soup so long as the noodles have been mashed-up a bit.
It’s still fun to try and run eastern states-registered vehicles towing caravans off the road when you see them, and I am thankfully still fit enough to follow visiting football fans leaving Subi back to their hotel rooms and then smear shit on their doorknobs, but I do miss those heady days of wild youth when, for want of a Governor who only had the bottle, we could have been kings.
These youngsters you write of above may have had one good day on their own particular battlefield, but true heroes are those who are in it for the long haul. These meme things they’re fighting, if they’re even half as serious as they sound like, can give them a lifetime of glorious struggle if they’re up for it.
Regards
Ron Muppet
At ease