Pinioned by Opinion: prologue

Following last week's pastiche of Gerard Henderson and Bob Ellis, the folk at Catalyst told me to re-tool slightly. Here follows a slighly broader version of that pastiche, titled Pinioned by Opinion, free with complimentary #hashtag, #sayyestoPBO

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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.