Greatest-ever turns surfers from drug and sex fiends into Gaia-worshipping hypocrites!
Don’t we exist in a golden age of opinion? With a few clicks and swipes we announce ourselves on our little social forums as experts on everything from the political machinations of foreign countries to breakthrough medical cures (cannabis oil) to the technical and tactical mistakes of our favourite surfers.
All that hoopla re: Kelly and the sharks? Oowee. None of us know shit.
Kelly was fool enough to open a debate on the bedevilled subject in an attempt to share information and got showered in insults.
In the Slater era, surfing has transformed from a sybaritic subculture to a pastime pursued by way too many brainwashed Gaia-worshippers who liberally accuse others of hypocrisy between loading their toxic surfboards onto planes and flying to remote tropical destinations, where their western habits are quickly in conflict with the supposedly natural attractions.
Now, as Fred Pawle posits in The Australian, Kelly has brainwashed us all.
Fred writes, “Ever since he burst onto the scene in 1990, aged 18, Slater has been the thinking person’s surfer. When he became the subject of the most frenzied sponsorship battle in surfing history, he chose to go back to finish high school in Florida.
“A lot of guys that start to make money think that they don’t need anything else,” he said at the time. “I don’t look at it that way. High school isn’t a hard thing to do. It keeps your mind in gear.”
This, at a time when the pro tour was a teenage hedonist’s paradise of women, drugs, money and waves. Slater eschewed all that, and single-handedly raised surfing out of its prolonged juvenile delinquency.
But his influence might have been too strong, even for him. In the Slater era, surfing has transformed from a sybaritic subculture to a pastime pursued by way too many brainwashed Gaia-worshippers who liberally accuse others of hypocrisy between loading their toxic surfboards onto planes and flying to remote tropical destinations, where their western habits are quickly in conflict with the supposedly natural attractions.
Slater’s high-school diploma could never have prepared him for the phenomenon of millions of surfers becoming enamoured by the very creatures that would eat them, and spewing vitriol at even fellow surfers for daring to espouse a different opinion. It’s as if some surfers have forgotten their own contribution to the collective happiness of mankind, or how lucky they are to be surfers at all.
Slater himself has often been the figurehead for all this misanthropy and self-flagellation. He even once endorsed Sea Shepherd, the radical group that more than any other backs the preservation of sharks, at the expense of surfers’ limbs and lives.”
Have you been brainwashed by Kelly? Do you hear a humming sound when he appears on television or your computer screen? Proof!
You can click here to read the front and tail of this story but it’s hiding behind a paywall…
