The Goodes stuff. The whining, needy bullshit that the anti-Goodes camp has come out with this week is dispiriting in a manner distinct to settler-capitalist countries -- a toxic mix of white self-congratulation, easy hurt and then playing the victim. It is something more than unpleasant for Goodes, all indigenous players, and well, anyone indigenous. But as a set of social symptoms, it's a goldmine. Magic water man Paul Hansen weighed in on Wednesday, completing the circle to a degree. It was Sheehan's late '90s classic Among the Barbarians that started a lot of this off -- the claim by highly paid culture-class professionals like Sheehan, Bolt, etc that they somehow "represent" the masses. Sheehan makes clear what everyone knows about the people who make up such a self-selecting crowd -- that their great passion above anything else is self-pity.
Football as played or watched is play and release, an expression of human freedom. Imagine the energy and focus, the self-abnegation it takes to spend the afternoon instead booing one man every time he gets the ball. That's hard work, but if they must, they must, they tell themselves. It's an envy/gratitude, half-empty/half-full type thing. People -- and whole social classes -- go through life thinking either that life is something where success breeds success, or it's a zero-sum game, and what you have, I don't. The former is gratitude, the latter envy, as an original position, which shapes how you live life. The booing crowd are envious. They want Goodes to show gratitude to them -- gratitude being a quiet, "good Aborigine", happy to get a game -- and when he doesn't their envy goes through the roof. The booing is essentially the exhaust feature of it. If that part of the crowd returned to a position of gratitude -- watching the game and simply enjoying the players' skills, without feeling the need to annihilate one of them -- they would all disappear in a puff of smoke .
That "what about me" reversal was perfectly expressed by the mother of the young girl Goodes reported, and later spoke amicably with. She thought Goodes should apologise and that would "make him a better person". The girl herself is unfussed and getting on with her life. Of course. Because she had already apologised and had it accepted, and is still a person-in-progress, not a lump of resentful scar tissue like some of the adults around her. Is that the greatest absurdity of all this? That the girl herself has renounced the act that others are still willing, in their thousands, to defend on her behalf?
No. The greatest and most vicious absurdity is that in the week after everyone was billing and cooing over To Kill A Mockingbird, a black man can still be targeted by the mob for having contact with a young white girl.
