There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of being misquoted in the national broadsheet. That’s the experience of the Boganomics team today with The Australian selectively quoting from Friday’s runaway success story, CateGate, which was picked up by the Fairfax press. The Australian’s Cut and Paste section ran a series of excerpts today under the headline:
Friends, pseudonym-loving Fairfax scribblers, countrymen, lend me your sneers
“Michael Jayfox”, “E. Chas McSween” and “Intravenus De Milo” in The Sydney Morning Herald on Friday:
THE question of climate change has long been a vexed one for the bogan . . . Cate Blanchett appeared in a commercial attempting to convince the bogan to do the right thing by the planet . . . This confused the bogan to the point of madness, as it was unable to reconcile the fact that its celebrity deity was asking it to act against its own interests . . . The bogan’s typically uncomplicated life was now impossibly fraught with conflict . . . so it retreated from the sumptuous neon nourishment of its 138-inch LCD television and applied itself to something it knew was definitely real and good: a four-hour session of doughnuts on its Jet Ski. Climate change would have to wait until another day.
Anyone who read the satirical post in full will have noticed that a large portion of it singles out the folk at GetUp for being such asses as to assume that celebrities are an authoritative or effective means of communicating with the ‘people’.
That we are having to explain this satire to the national daily rather kills the joke, but it does helpfully illustrate why Boganomics is such a splendid column. Boganomics is not about sneering at bogans. On the contrary, it’s about exposing the populist manipulation of bogan-baiting corporation, organisations and, dare we say it, media. The Australian’s misleading cut and paste only exposes its own bias not to mention selective wowserishness. And that’s the whole damn point. Cha ching!