Well done, news media. You've got your priorities completely right. Ashton Kutcher getting his junk out to erase the memory of Charlie Sheen from Two and a Half Men IS blockbuster news. So is some skewed statistics about the number of drownings this year. Uh, floods unfortunately equal drownings, and more drownings than usual. Doesn't mean we've all forgotten how to swim. Aussies are generally pretty ready to deal with being dumped by a wave at the beach - in the street, not so much. It's not the shock they're making it out to be. It's just a sad reflection of the terrible events that occurred earlier this year.
But the one that really pisses me off is this At Home With Julia thing. So two actors representing our nation's prime minister and her partner are depicted nailing each other literally under the Australian flag. Seriously, so what? We're a country of sarcastic quips and unashamed satire - not to mention the fact that we respect our flag so much we (some of us, anyway) wear it as a cape on Australia Day.
Honestly, if you think about it, somebody must have done it. Probably loads of people have done it. In fact, I bet you'll be able to Like 'Doing It Under the Aussie Flag 'Cause You Fucking Love Your Country' (or similar) in a matter of days, if such a page doesn't exist already.
As with the stuff above, it's nothing extraordinary at all - not even with what the media is now calling 'fake Julia' and 'fake Tim' (because if you dropped the qualifiers, Mrs and Mr PM could slap defamation on any media outlet's ass and win the case in a matter of seconds) being the ones doing the deed.
And I really don't buy into the whole 'disrespect to our war veterans' thing. Yes, the flag is the symbol our nation. Yes, people have fought and died under it (figuratively in this case, because people realised a long time ago that having standard bearers in war is a terrible idea), and yes, people are still fighting and dying under it. Sadly, probably people will die for it before the year is out.
But I think all this talk of disrespect a massive misunderstanding of semiotics. That's right - popping out my much-maligned comms learning here. At the most basic level (which is really all I remember) everything, including each and every word I'm typing here, is made up of signifier and signified. In other words, meaning is not inherent to the words that I'm typing. They are merely the signifier indicating a signified.
Let's return to the main point for an example. The Australian flag is a signifier. The meaning we draw from it is the signified - in this case, love and/or pride in our country and all that it stands for. So we associate the flag with that idea - but the flag in itself does not mean 'Australia'. You show that to someone who's never seen it before, they won't just magically understand what it can mean, because it is just a symbol.
And to try and tear myself off this tangent, I don't believe you can disrespect so vast a concept as Australia by having actors portraying key political figures simulating sex (or implying that sex has occurred - after all, the bloody episode hasn't even aired yet!) underneath it. It's too big an idea and too normal an act. And as I said, the flag is not a physical incarnation of the idea we connect it to. It's just a bit of fabric, at the end of the day.
I can understand that the parents of recently deceased soldiers might be most upset about this. But it's still mistaking a symbol of a thing for the thing itself. The way we conceptualise Australia will remain even if we were to, say, change the flag, as has been suggested by other stupid media beat-ups.
I don't blame the people who are upset about this, though it is a result of ignorance. The ones who annoy me are all the media people out there who quite literally made this into a thing. Studying journalism as I did, and abandoning it as a career, (on grounds of not wanting to spend my life intruding into the lives of others) I know one or two things - specifically, that there are actual lists of what constitutes news value, one of which is conflict. Something I've long since realised is that this value of conflict is the single most called-upon news value in pretty much any media outlet anywhere in the world. What I imagine happened with At Home With Julia was this:
A: Person sees advance screening of episode
B: Possibly laughs at the scene
C: 'Nose for news' detects potential for conflict
D: Tells boss
E: Interviews people they know will respond with outrage
F: Publish
Rinse and repeat for every single reporter who saw the episode ahead of time, or just blame the Herald Sun, who, though I feel they are more likely to show both sides of political opinion than The Age, are into some serious muck-raking nonetheless.
So basically we live in an age where our Fourth Estate, our bastion of the public's right to know, goes around picking silly little fights that only a select few emotionally fragile people will truly be upset about, filling up newspapers and websites, and blowing our radio and TV stations full of hot air. News is not an entertainment product and nor should it be. It's meant to ensure that essential (and some non-essential) truths cannot be hidden from the public. And the sooner editors, journos and reporters remember that, rather than just using it as an empty excuse to accost people in the street (looking at you, ACA and TT), the better.
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