Guess what’s coming next
There are some (many?) newspaper articles that play out exactly like you thought they were going to. Stereotypes are imported wholesale. Straw men are hastily erected, and attacked mercilessly. Certain phrases capture the thought of the piece so concisely and completely, that reading the remainder of the article is just killing time.
Sort of like watching Titanic.
Two articles from the Herald grabbed my attention for this reason over the weekend. One was a tech article, on the opening of the new Apple store in Sydney. The straw men, in this case, are the ‘mac faithful’:
For the cult who worship the Mac, the company co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs has become the high priest and the Apple Store his temple. It is a place to go to worship and give thanks for having an alternative to Microsoft, PCs and Windows.
Hmm. That’s right. Mac users are zealots, sort of, you know… different… to normal people.
The other was an astounding juxtaposition of ideas, in a short piece on the Anglican church:
Archbishop Jensen is one of the leaders of 1000 conservative churchmen from 17 Anglican provinces who will gather at the Jerusalem Global Anglican Futures Conference this month. Mainly from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, they are united on one principal issue: hostility to homosexuality.
But Archbishop Jensen argues: “This dispute is not really about homosexuality. It’s really about authority and who runs the church. And fairly clearly, to most of the rest of us, God runs the church through the Bible.”
Not a great example of listening skills, it seems.
Fascinating.
