Yesterday, the Melbourne Football Club, as well as the Melbourne Victory Football Club and the Melbourne Rebels Rugby Union Club dumped Energy Watch as their sponsors after the co-founder and CEO of the company, Ben Polis, was found to have made a series of offensive comments on his Facebook page.
I like writing emails to people like Ben, as they are often misunderstood and I am very good at looking at things from a different perspective. Here’s one I wrote a little while ago:
Dear Ben,
I am writing this email to you tod
I am white and male.
I am writing this email to you today both to lend my support at this difficult time and (I hope this doesn’t sound opportunistic) to propose a business deal.
I feel that the way you have been treated has been nothing short of disgraceful! (Is it OK if I put exclamation marks at the end of my sentences? I know you have ADHD and I know rambunctious punctuation can set a person with ADHD off, so I thought I’d check.)
We seem to live in a nanny state where freedom of speech is frowned upon in the same way that soap might be at a brown person’s home/adobe hut/teepee. You have done nothing more than say what 99% of us are thinking (closer to 132% in Queensland) and for that you are lambasted and labelled a bigot and a racist and a grub and a fuckwit and rodent with mange and a moronic dweeb and a small-minded cock and a loathsome mouse-dog and a man whose minuscule brain surely matches his minuscule penis and a repellent maggot and a rosy-faced cretin and a small, podgy dipshit and an angry little gerbil and Jake King’s long lost identical twin and a dead carp’s slowly disintegrating prolapsed anus and an unctuous, ulcerous semi-human and probably some other things.
For simply speaking the truth you are chopped down, as all tall poppies are in this country of class envy and progressive taxation.
What a joke! (Hope that exclamation mark didn’t send you into silly antics like Curly from The Three Stooges.)
What annoys me most of all is that upon being labelled a racist, you immediately refuted the claim and provided incontrovertible evidence of the opposite being true. Why wasn’t that the end of it? I too have Oriental help and, like you, am very fond of them. I like to give them a little slap on the buttocks as they clean my bidet in the home cinema and sometimes bow to them as they’re leaving for the day and say “ah so” as a show of cultural solidarity. I also found Mickey Rooney’s turn as Mr Fukkamoto (or whatever his name was) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s exceptionally funny, not because he ridicules Chinese/Japanese people, turning them into a preposterous caricature, but because he inhabits the role and brings out the inherent humanity of those two races. Why couldn’t people accept your affection for Asians on face value and move on? (Maybe next time mention Mickey Rooney.)
And the same for your comments on indigenes. You implied that they were savages and infested with fungal diseases, then said you had no beef with them. Case closed. What do they want? A formal apology? Again?
And, as you so eloquently put it, your comments aren’t discriminatory because they’re totally indiscriminate. You had a playful little dig at all the races, including negroids, Israelites and the car bomb ones. What do the PC Brigade want – a law that says you can only make fun of good honest Christian carrion eaters like Margaret Court?
As for claims that you are a tiprat, I say embrace them. A tiprat is one of nature’s great entrepreneurs, unafraid to get their paws dirty and, contrary to popular belief actually very clean animals (putting aside the Bubonic Plague). You are a tiprat, good sir. Ben Polis the Tiprat – wear that epithet as a badge of honour.
Now to my business proposal.
Are you familiar with the Hero-gram? It often becomes popular around the time of big events like the Olympics, the World Cup and the Aryan Purity Games and allows young whipper-snappers to send messages of support to their sporting heroes. My concept takes that idea and turns it around and shakes it vigorously and kills a dog and makes it better than the original concept. I call it Zero-grams. It gives people a chance to send messages not to heroes, but to losers and nobodies and foreigners. So, for instance, if you’re cut off in traffic by an Asian woman, instead of getting angry, you just open up the Zero-gram app on your phone (while you’re still driving, if you like – this isn’t Communist Russia, after all) type in your message – “You add no value to society apart from insurance premiums” for instance – and then using a series of algorithms and Google privacy short-cuts and maybe some magic or something (I haven’t really got to the ins and outs yet), the app sends that message to your target in the form of a text message.
We could charge 12 cents a character, and wouldn’t have to spend a dollar on advertising – we could just do the Sydney AM radio circuit (apart from the pinkoes at the ABC, obviously). As long as Alan Jones didn’t consider it an infringement of his intellectual property, he would bloody love it.
Once we’re up and running, having learnt from your bitter experience, we would steer clear of the chardonnay socialists and multiculturalist weirdos at the AFL, A-League and Super15s, and go straight to the NRL for jumper sponsorship negotiations. As long as they didn’t consider it an infringement on their intellectual property, they would bloody love it.
As for start-up capital, if you’re now a bit short after the whole becoming a corporate and social pariah thing, I intend to write to Clive Palmer in the not too distant future and will make sure I bring up our scheme.
Ben, sincerely wishing you all the very best in your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Your friend and brother in (Caucasian) arms,
Jonathan Rivett
Haught fact of the day:
Margaret Court is the only dinosaur known to have made it through to the Cenozoic Era.
Other emails I’ve sent:
No response as yet, I presume?
None yet, I’m devastated to say.
Absolute Gold. As a former employee, i thank you and have forwarded to all other former employees.
Good boss, was he?
Who the hell ARE you???! So friggin’ funny, gold! I needed this laugh (Ben Polis email), more than you’ll ever know. I could kiss your feet. Thanx xo
Well now, dee, that’s just lovely feedback (as the kiddies say these days). You can find out a bit more about me on the Haught Facebook page. And, at the risk of sounding like a self-absorbed wanker, don’t forget to tell your friends about the blog.
Facebook?….at the risk of sounding like a social outcast, I don’t do Facebook. “WTF?!”, is the usual response. Yes, I am one of the very few refusing to join and, in the process, being left behind in this age of “see us on Facebook” and “Facebook me” madness. Much like a lone Coco Pop left in the cereal bowl, I insist on growing soggy in my (it seems) lone protest. This comes after my first encounter with Facebook many moons ago…it was a gossip’s paradise among fellow employees and I had no interest in joining their “oh,did u see what she posted on Facebook?”, “hehehe,you’ll never guess who just poked me on Facebook,hehehe” juivie antics. I didn’t know how you could poke someone over the internet, and I didn’t want to find out. Thus began a healthy hatred for the social network and the many, many groans heard from friends who tried (and still try, in vain, I might add) to get me to join. My suspicions that FB was the internet’s official schoolyard were backed by a series of happenings that included a friend and several other people I know being cautioned by employers to curb/monitor their FB comments,with the threat that they could lose their jobs (and one eventually did!), and a neighbour having their house broken into after their daughter posted their holiday plans on her page (hmmm, perhaps FB is fast becoming the potential home invader’s BFF?). The funniest thing that happened – my sister was actually bumped off Facebook by, err, Facebook, for posting bitchy comments about another FB user. She was marched directly to the Facebook Principal’s virtual office and put in time-out,for 2 weeks! Ha! Classic. So, you see, I can’t check you out on Facebook. I guess I’ll just have to keep on wondering who you are. Think of it like the olden days, before the invention of the telegram, when people had to rely on correspondence through the postal service, or when you had to wait in line at Kodak for your camera roll to be processed and printed, only to discover that half of your prints are images of your cousin trying to take fotos of his pimply arse. Yes, i will continue to wonder who you are, and will keep enjoying your posts. PS – Love the grape men, they remind me of an Italian family who had a holiday home nextdoor to our house when we were growing up. A colourful bunch, we loved them and always waited for Friday afternoons to see if they were coming that weekend. Endless entertainment. God I miss them…