Everyone a winner in the self-righteous outrage stakes

December 08, 2005 THE Association of Outraged Australians annually asks its members to pick the country’s top 10 public intellectuals.

And this year, as usual, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Pilger dominated the voting.

But this time the judging collective jacked up and applied affirmative action principles to the poll.

Ignoring allegations of continentalism, most nominees were ruled out because they were not Australians. And despite denunciations they were being lifeist, the association also outlawed M. Sartre, on the grounds of death.

In their place, the judges named our top 10 big thinkers:

Professor Zach Squiggle: Squiggle is the author of a high school algebra textbook, 1100 articles and a forthcoming monograph “Productivity is a Bosses Trick”. He is building a computer model that demonstrates how the laws of supply and demand are disproved by a mathematical analysis of sunspot activity.

Dr Katrina Lascivious: Lascivious won the Walkley award for Polygender Awareness last year with a kit compiled for the Society of Pig Shooting Correspondents on cross-dressing issues in the industry. She is presently engaged on a performance scholarship project that involves her watching repeats of Buffy the Vampire Slayer every Monday night and commenting on the casts’ clothes.

Flyn O’Terrify: The Environmental Activist Laureate. He is best known for his prediction that air-conditioning-induced global warming will lead to Darwin being devoured by giant cane toads. O’Terrify’s latest book argues environmental sustainability dictates all Australians leave the continent.

Fran Glam: A freelance policy thinker, Glam was named as Sisterhood magazine’s glamour puss of the year in 1976. She is now CEO of the Institute for Intellectual Re-Cycling where she is studying how many years one snappy title can support a media profile. Her most recent publication is an essay “That Cow Katrina”.

Cleve Grimm: His two-volume study of consumption patterns in Australia, Abstinence is the New Black, argues family life has collapsed since the introduction of electricity. Grimm is also in arbitration with Squiggle over their mutually contested claim to the title of “Australia’s most intense intellectual”.

Pamela Slamm: Slamm is a long-time campaigner for state support for stay-at-home mums, until they are safely through their first divorce, the children’s that is. She is petitioning the UN for children who attend childcare centres to be covered by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.

Hamish McLunch: McLunch is famous for his long-term study of the Australian psyche. He famously first brought his work to a mass audience with his book, Streuth We’re Stressed! (1985). He followed it a decade later with Streuth! We’re Still Stressed. On the basis of new research he refined his thesis in this year’s Stressed out by Stress.

Hilary Megawatt: The author of Everything is Toxic. A qualified physiotherapist with a diploma in liberation theology, she has undertaken comparative analyses of nuclear, coal and wind energy sources, based on conversations with resident action groups located near power stations. Her thesis, that the only medically and environmentally safe power sources are bicycle powered generators, is described by O’Terrify as the most academically acute analysis of environmental risk since the Book of Revelations.

Spiro Pirandella: A native of Mount Gambier, Spiro is a poet whose work chronicles the cultural oppression of artists working on epic poems in languages other than English. He is artist in residence at the Australian Arts Centre palazzo in Florence, where he studies the use of traditional Tuscan dialects in menus.

Magdalena Monroe: Monroe’s long awaited study on devil worship among tradespeople explains the motivation behind the Howard Government’s introduction of the GST, the sale of Telstra and workplace reform. She is teaching Australian politics at the Alaska Teachers College and working on a plan to merge the Australian Democrats with the Uniting Church.

When asked why John Pilger was dropped from the list, despite being alive and Australian-born, a spokesperson for the association said Pilger had renounced his citizenship in protest at the fascism of every government since 1975 and now called Kyrgyzstan home. That, she added, was their story and they were sticking to it.

Next week: The best and brightest members of the Society of Right Thinkers.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17494596%5E38856,00.html