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The Farrow-Allen case is a sad private spectacle now playing out
in the public sphere, and frankly I don’t want to hear any more about it. (John McQuaid, Forbes. 2/2)
So began the week when late Western capitalism (to use a favourite term
of late) –or I—began cleaning long-abandoned cupboards—or re-reading
half-remembered op-eds--where soused uncles—ah, I’m not going there—were found
to speak truth to power about the ancient saying, ‘in vino veritas’, or, for
those still not cognisant of English’s Latin roots, ‘in wine, there is truth’.
Welcome to Pinioned by Opinion,
the weekly blog in which I’ll take a look at some of the most out-there
comments and columns of the week (but probably not anything from the ‘Out
There’ column, if it’s still running, by Baz Blakeney for the Herald Sun, which, as I recall, is
actually mildly humourous and not at all ‘out there’).
Woody Allen has been the poster boy for psychotherapists for years, and
when allegations emerged of Allen’s treatment towards family members—and let’s
not kid ourselves by restricting the definition of family members to those with
the same surname as a given person—views as large as the ‘Hollywood’ sign
through which Allen has made his name surfaced. We’ll return to McQuaid
shortly.
Everyone’s favourite executive director (and I speak of none other than
Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute), got an article concerning (for the
problem that it covers is concerning) the Allen affair published in the Australian. Mr Henderson (for a mister
he is!) saw the matter face-to-face with allegations of child abuse in the Catholic
Church. Whether abuse
committed by organisations or individuals is worse is moot, but there seems to
be a wider body of evidence about the Catholic Church’s activities than
Allen’s. That is not to condone or exculpate the fact there is an allegation of
such heinous activity, by the way.
McQuaid, who in his bio for
Forbes says he writes about “dysfunctional America” (don’t we know a bit about
that!), was the kind of article that pedants (no, pedants) prey on. Titled ‘No, You Don't
Have To Have An Opinion About Woody Allen And Dylan Farrow’, McQuaid got nowhere fast with his
argument that esteemed media organisations such as the one he is paid by shouldn’t
be covering the story that he is being paid to cover. Or maybe he thinks Forbes
should be the only esteemed media organisation to cover the story. Exclusivity,
and all that.
(Nick Cater, eat your heart out.)
Certainly, we know Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter—the
very nature of which is designed to be seen by as many people as humanly
possible—in which she detailed her claims. Logically speaking, McQuaid is
saying Farrow should have kept quiet. Blaming the alleged victim is such a
fantastic way [sarcasm font] for a putatively impartial observer to make a
point.
For those playing at home: the easiest and most effective
way for McQuaid to make his point would have been to not make it at all. But, as
McQuaid writes:
the toxic
mix of celebrity and molestation charges is irresistible to the media. We can’t
look away. Even if we do, the moment we look back there’s some new bit of news
or commentary about the case.
So McQuaid is simply compelled to use some of his ‘valuable editorial
space’ to write about it, which over-rides any complaints he has about the
whole affair. He’s just doing his job, I’m guessing.
From that we turn to testosterone in teenage boys. For The
Daily Telegraph, Clare Masters, who would have so much first-hand
experience about the topic, decides to lead with an anecdote about smashing a
car—probably a worn-out bush basher—that, later on in the piece, Masters
reckons doesn’t have to be that soul-destroying:the utter
destruction of cars can be a positive exercise if the destroyers are then
taught how to put the pieces back together.
Why Masters would think that teenage boys
who have gone to the effort to destroy the car with ‘bats and concrete blocks’
would then go on to ‘put the pieces back together’ is beyond me. But then, I’m
not a mother of two young boys, so I wouldn’t know about the psychology of
teenage boys.
Masters gives us a clue as to what
she thinks of the topic she’s writing about:
As the
mother of two young boys I frequently come across the sympathetic eyebrow-raise
of the
stranger who usually spouts off the very unoriginal: "you've got
your hands full don't you?”
Unoriginality is more honoured in the
breach than in the observance, and the piece is riddled with more clichés than
an exposition on lateral thinking by Edward de Bono. The article (which comes
to the tame conclusion that parents are responsible for whether their young
boys turn into malevolent, shiv-wielding gangsters in Kings Cross and King St)
has no relevance and hardly any timeliness (Barry O’Farrell’s new pub laws are
briefly mentioned). What have we learnt?
Lastly, in this first dispatch, I would
like to address Helen Razer’s leggings.
That sounds incredibly creepy. Let me
try again. Helen Razer took
issue with an article on leggings as revolutionary object or something-or-other. To me,
the article was extraneous guff but Razer decided to live-Tweet the thing. It
was decent sport on Sunday evening now that the cricket’s finished, and
definitely a better option than the Winter Olympics. Enjoy.
You can
suggest op-eds for Cameron to cover, and/or abuse him, on Twitter at @Cameron_Magusic.
From that we turn to testosterone in teenage boys. For The Daily Telegraph, Clare Masters, who would have so much first-hand experience about the topic, decides to lead with an anecdote about smashing a car—probably a worn-out bush basher—that, later on in the piece, Masters reckons doesn’t have to be that soul-destroying:the utter destruction of cars can be a positive exercise if the destroyers are then taught how to put the pieces back together.
