I have been known, upon occasion, to appeal to my journalism degree to justify my bad writing when someone calls me out on it.
Dilbert called me out on this a couple of days ago.
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
Here’s the ACL’s problem with the gay marriage debate… and mine
The ACL’s Jim Wallace was on Sunrise this morning.
Here’s what he says.
He breaks Godwin’s law about 1:51 in. Woohoo.
“The issue is that marriage is about children”
It’s so shrill and angry.
Here’s what Queensland Director Wendy Francis said afterwards.
Which is, quite frankly, illogical given that her national director just spent 8 minutes on national television where the rights of children were his only argument. And it has been their consistently reported position on the issue since day dot.
That’s their problem with the gay marriage debate. Here’s mine.
It’s not about Jesus.
This is especially the problem because in just about everybody’s eyes – as demonstrated in the video above – the gay marriage debate is conservative Christians vs everybody else (though Kochie acknowledges that Muslims and Jews don’t like gay marriage either). And the representatives of conservative Christianity in Australia, the ACL, don’t want to talk about Jesus. On national television. They want to talk about motherhood and fatherhood. Two good things. But secondary.
The gay marriage debate is primarily about identity. Nobody is questioning why sexuality should be the locus of human identity. If the premise is true – and it’s not – then the case for gay marriage being a human right is a lay down misere.
Talking about our human identity coming several steps in the process before sexual attraction (or orientation) and sexual identity (gay/lesbian/straight/bi/a) means we can coherently talk about our real identity being found in being created in God’s image, for a purpose, and being able to find a true expression of humanity in Jesus.
Knowing Jesus is the basis of a person discovering, and living out, the purpose they were created for. People are free to reject that, and should be free to choose their own identity outside of social pressure, and even the biological/environmental factors that shape sexual orientation. This argument is harder to win, but it’s ultimately more convincing and more faithful than throwing one’s hands in the air and screaming “won’t somebody think of the children”…
I’d like my children to grow up in a world where their identity isn’t chosen for them based on who they’re attracted to – which isn’t a choice they’ll necessarily get to make anyway – I want them to be free to choose to identify and find their value in serving the Lord Jesus. This is my problem with the ACL, and the gay marriage debate.
From a policy point of view, I think I’ve said this before, but Michael Bird said it heaps better, why don’t we lobby for the state to get out of defining marriage altogether. Let people call their registered relationships whatever they want.
Some things I like about Luther: Bon Vivant, Raconteur, Font Snob
I just finished an essay about Luther’s life, with a particular emphasis on his use of the 16th century’s equivalent of social media – the propaganda pamphlet. It was fun. I read a couple of biographies (including this one). He was a pretty cool guy. Here’s some stuff I think is worth sharing.
On Typography
“I cannot say how sorry and disgusted I am with the printing. I wish I had sent nothing in German, because they print it so poorly, carelessly, and confusedly, to say nothing of bad types and paper. John the printer is always the same old Johnny. Please do not let him print any of my German Homilies, but return them for me to send elsewhere. What is the use of my working so hard if the errors in the printed books give occasion to other publishers to make them still worse ? I would not sin so against the gospels and epistles ; better let them remain hidden than bring them out in such form. Therefore I send you nothing now, although I have a good deal of manuscript ready. I shall forward no more until I learn that these sordid mercenaries care less for their profits than for the public. Such printers seem to think : “It is enough for me to get the money; let the readers lookout for the matter.”
On the Toilet
One of Luther’s biographers says:
“It is strange, and yet certain, that this revelation (justification by faith alone) was vouchsafed to him in the privy of the Black Cloister, situated in the little tower overlooking the town walls… It is simpler, however, to recollect only that Luther was a busy man, with little leisure for private meditation, and that the rule enjoined spiritual reflection at these times. In telling the story of the monk who prayed while sitting on the stool, and had a controversy with the devil about the propriety of so doing, Luther probably referred to his own practice. It must naturally have seemed odd to him at the time, however, that such a revelation should come on such an occasion…”
On the Pope’s Hat
Luther didn’t like the pope much. This is some guys relieving themselves in his hat.
On beards and being incognito
At one point, when the emperor declared him an outlaw, Luther was “kidnapped” by some friends and hidden in a castle. He grew a beard. When some bad stuff was going down in his home town he travelled back there as a spy, in disguise.
Later, when he was heading home after his castle exile ended, he went to a pub and had this conversation with two guys who rocked up while he was there. At least this is how he tells the story.
Luther – Good evening, friends. Draw nearer and have a drink to warm you up. I see you are Swiss ; from what part do you come and whither are you going ?
Kessler – We come from St. Gall, sir, and we are going to Wittenberg.
Luther – To Wittenberg ? Well, you will find good compatriots of yours there, the brothers Jerome and Augustine Schurf.
Kessler – We have letters to them. Can you tell us, sir, whether Luther is now at Wittenberg, or where he may be ?
Luther – I have authentic information that he is not at Wittenberg, but that he will soon return. But Philip Melanchthon is there to teach Greek, and Aurogallus to teach you Hebrew, both of which languages you should study if you wish to understand the Bible.
Kessler – Thank God that Luther will soon be back ; if God grant us life we will not rest until we see and hear that man. For it is on account of him that we are going there. We have heard that he wishes to overturn the priesthood and the mass, and as our parents have brought us up to be priests, we want to hear what he can tell us and on what authority he acts.
Luther – Where have you studied formerly ?
Kessler – At Basel.
Luther – How goes it as Basel? Is Erasmus there and what is he doing?
Kessler – Erasmus is there, sir, but what he does no man knows, for he keeps it a secret. (Aside to his companion as Luther takes a drink) I never knew a knight before who used so much Latin, nor one who understood Greek and Hebrew as this one seems to.
Luther – Friends, what do they think of Luther in Switzerland ?
Kessler – There are various opinions there, sir, as everywhere. Some cannot extol him enough, and thank God for having revealed truth and discovered error by him ; others, especially the clergy, condemn him as an intolerable heretic.
Luther – One might expect as much from the preachers
Spengler – (Raising book which he sees is a Hebrew Psalter) I would give a finger to understand this tongue.
Luther – You must work hard to learn it. I also am learning it, and practise some every day.
(It is getting dark. Host bustles up, lights more candles, stops before
table.)
Host – I overheard you, gentlemen, talking of Luther. Pity you were not all here two days ago ; he was here then at this table, sitting right there (points).
Spengler – If this cursed weather had not hindered us we should have been here then and should have seen him. Is it not a pity ?
Kessler – At least we ought to be thankful that we are in the same house that he was and at the very table where he sat. (Host laughs, goes toward door ; when out of sight of Luther turns and beckons Kessler, who rises anxiously thinking that he has done something amiss and goes to host.)
Host – (aside to Kessler) Now that I see that you really want to hear and see Luther, I may tell you that the man at your table is he.
Kessler – You’re just gulling me because you think I want to see Luther.
Host – No, it is positively he, but don’t let on that you know him. (Kessler returns to table, where Luther has begun to read again.)
Kessler – (whispering to his companion) The host tells me this man is Luther.
Spengler – What on earth? Perhaps he said “Hutten”; the two names sound alike, and he certainly looks more like a knight than a monk.
(Enter two merchants, who take off their cloaks. One of them lays
a book on the table.)
Luther – May I ask, friend, what you are reading ?
Merchant – Doctor Luther’s sermons, just out ; have you not seen them?
Luther – I shall soon, at any rate.
Host – Sit down, gentlemen, sit down ; it is supper-time now.
Luther – Come here, gentlemen ; I will stand treat. (The merchants sit down and supper is served.) These are bad times, gentlemen. I heard only recently of the princes and lords assembling at Nuremberg to settle the religious question and remedy the grievances of the German nation. What do they do ? Nothing but waste their time in tournaments and all kinds of wicked diversions. They ought to pray earnestly to God. Fine princes they are ! Let us hope that our children and posterity will be less poisoned by papal errors and more given to the truth than their parents, in whom error is so firmly implanted that it is hard to root out.
First Merchant – I am a plain, blunt man, look you, who understand little of this business, but I say to myself, as far as I can see, Luther must be either an angel from heaven or a devil from hell. I would give ten gulden to have the chance to confess to him ; I believe he could give me good counsel for my conscience. (The merchants get up and go out to feed their horses.)
Host – (to students) You owe me nothing ; Luther has paid it all.
Kessler – Thank you, sir, shall I say Hutten ?
Luther – No, I am not he ; (to host) I am made a noble to-night, for these Switzers take me for Ulrich von Hutten.
Host – You are not Hutten, but Martin Luther.
Luther – (laughing) They think I am Hutten ; you that I am Luther; soon I’ll be Prester John. (Raising his glass) Friends, I drink your health (putting down his glass), but wait a moment; host, bring us a measure of wine ; the beer is not so good for me, as I am more accustomed to wine. (They drink.)
Luther – (rising to say good-night and offering them his hand) When you get to Wittenberg, remember me to Jerome Schurf.
Kessler – Whom shall we remember, sir ?
Luther – Say only that he that will soon come sends his greetings.
(Exit.)
What Facebook’s “Promote post” option means for promoting stuff on Facebook
Facebook is a bit of a minefield for marketing/communication people to navigate at the best of times. It can be incredibly useful, and plenty of businesses swear by it, but it can also be an incredible waste of time. Especially because Facebook keep changing the game. And they keep finding all the really effective ways people are using the platform to boost their business without paying – and killing them.
I’ve got a few marketing clients who use Facebook, I use Facebook advertising to help out with my sister-in-law’s bridal make-up and children’s theatre companies, and I use Facebook to promote Stir, a Christian event in Brisbane, and think about how we use Facebook as a church. Incidentally – it appears Facebook is currently doing a survey where they’re giving out $25 in advertising credit.
I know heaps of sole trader small business/creative/entrepreneurial types who use Facebook as the sole means of promoting their business and finding clients. While these friends of mine have chosen Facebook because they don’t want to spend on advertising – I don’t think this change represents a hurdle for these types of business. This model, resisting advertising, relies on creating good products, and putting these creations on Facebook in a way that encourages sharing. It’s word of mouth stuff. That just takes strategy, encouraging people/customers to share your business with their friends, and putting up posts that people are more likely to interact with and share. That business model isn’t really going to be threatened by this change unless a huge number of people start paying to have their posts shared in a way that clogs up all of their friends’ news feeds.
In the last couple of days Facebook has rolled out a new revenue raiser. The “promote post” option – not just for pages, but for individuals. You can pay to make sure every one of your friends sees your latest update. I assume the cost is figured out by how many of your friends are regularly interacting with your posts, and how many friends you have might also be a factor.
This is potentially a game changer – both positively and negatively. Here’s some reasons why.
First of all – Facebook is now a public company, it has to make money for its shareholders, it has to produce revenue to pay its costs, and people don’t really love anything Facebook does to make money, because for some reason we think it’s free.
There’s an old saying, If you’re not paying for Facebook, you’re the product, not the customer. It’s trite, but true.
Second, the real strength of Facebook, for companies, and particularly for churches, is the platform it provides to communicate to people who have opted in by liking your gear – ads that convert to likes are ultimately more valuable in the long term, than ads that convert to one off sales, or event attendance.
Third, in my experience, advertising is good at securing likes. But, unless you’re serving up ads to your fan base, rather than to your targeted audience, it’s likely that you’re paying about $0.80 for a like that goes nowhere. The chance to send a guaranteed post to the newsfeeds of 800 people for five British pounds is, in my mind, better than the return on investment where you pay $20 for 25 likes. But used together, there’s a good chance to turn likes into something a bit more ongoing.
Fourth, until this change – there was no guarantee that what you post on Facebook gets into your friends’/followers’ news feeds. Facebook is clever. It knows you won’t come back if all you see is 13 photos of cats from your aunt’s crazy friend who you accepted because you know how fragile her delicate ego is and you didn’t want to push her over the edge. It also knows you don’t want to be constantly spammed by businesses you don’t really value, who somehow tricked you into hitting like. Facebook works out what you want to see using a clever algorithm called Edgerank. What they’ve told the world is that edgerank figures out your relationship to all the elements that can possibly appear in your news feed using an algorithm that values how often you interact with the person/page, how many other people think their post is worth interacting with, and how recent the post is. If you’re a business (or person) and you have a bad social media strategy, where you post too much stuff that nobody cares about, pretty soon your stuff is pretty rarely going to hit the news feed and people will have to deliberately seek out your content. The stats on this are pretty appalling – most people like a Facebook page and never go back – which means they aren’t going to see your stuff very quickly, and any time and effort you’ve spent gathering a tribe of loyal followers is going down the drain.
This has implications for how you use Facebook if you’re interested in people seeing your stuff. Social media success, as far as the expensive social media consultants (or your cheap ones like me) are concerned, is about boosting interactions on your posts. This means posting stuff that encourages a response, posting really likeable stuff that people want to share, and trying to keep discussions going when they start. But that’s really hard, and takes time and effort, and there are plenty of businesses out there who have killed their edgerank by just not getting it (or knowing about it). So this promote post option offers a fresh start for businesses like that. It also gives businesses who do produce good content the opportunity to boost their edgerank – if what Facebook says about promoted posts is true (40% more interactions on promoted posts), then it is likely that the $5 hit, delivered a few times, will add value to your Facebook presence.
I’ll be using this option with a few of my clients, and factoring it in for a few of my content driven social marketing budgets. Because it takes a lot of the guess work out of using Facebook, and puts heaps more control back in the hands of page owners who have been dudded by the switch to Timeline (but that’s another story for another time).
I won’t be using it for my profile – partly because I don’t think it’s worth it, I have photos of a cute baby daughter to generate interactions. And the beauty of this is that once you’ve done it a few times, if you get a good response, you won’t have to keep doing it until Facebook inevitably reconfigures its EdgeRank algorithm.
Powerful media outlet, “Fox News” tied to Norwegian Terrorist
Apparently, according to Fox News, all that is needed to link something good, with something bad, is the use of a common language.
Powerful ‘Flame’ cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game
“The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language, cyber security experts tell Fox News — the same one used to make the incredibly popular Angry Birds game.”
And the image that they used with the story (in case you are smart enough not to click through)…
Fox News published this amazingly over the top, and downright idiotic headline and lede in English. Norwegian psycho Anders Breivik published his manifesto in English. Link established.
Seriously. This is horribad journalism. I know. It’s odd to be getting angry at Fox’s stupidity over a story like this, but it’s a dumb story that serves a much broader point about their credibility.
That is all.
A funny thing happened yesterday: how @CollectiveShout won Twitter (and me)
Anti-sexploitation lobby group Collective Shout does some smart, and necessary work, opposing the degradation of society. They’re like the ACL, only without “Christian” in their name, so not as cringeworthy. And they’re more focused.
Collective Shout cares about such things as logos.
This is theirs.
This is the flag adopted by Greendale Community College in Community.
I can’t look at the Collective Shout logo without being influenced by Community. So I thought I’d be funny. And I dug up a YouTube clip and tweeted:
The marketing people behind @CollectiveShout need to watch this Community clip and rethink their logo: youtube.com/watch?v=Y6oez0…
— Nathan Campbell (@nm_campbell) May 31, 2012
I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting much in response. I was, after all, stirring the pot a little, and mostly just showing off pop culture chops… But I got one. And it was snappy, relevant, and put me right in my place. It was from a real person. They weren’t just toeing a party line.
@nm_campbell seen it mate. you might want to alert the Red Hot Chili Peppers too. Same problem.
— Collective Shout (@CollectiveShout) May 31, 2012
There were a couple more tweets exchanged following this – but I left way more impressed with Collective Shout than I planned to be, this, people, is how you use social media – they actually do a great job on the social media awareness/activism front, so it doesn’t surprise me that they’ve got someone behind the keyboard who is savvy and engaged enough to produce this sort of response to pseudo-criticism.
I fart in your general direction: Luther and the Pope
I’m writing an essay at the moment about Luther. This explains the relative paucity of posts this week, and other essays are to blame for the last two weeks’ relative absence.
I’m going to look at Luther’s approach to communication throughout his life. And in the process of my research I came across this pamphlet that Luther distributed during the Reformation. In 1545, in his Depiction of the Papacy…
Image Credit: Wikifiles
The Latin reads:
“The Pope speaks: Our sentences are to be feared, even if unjust. Response: Be damned! Behold, o furious race, our bared buttocks. Here, Pope, is my ‘belvedere'”
Tetris: the blockbuster
Possibly the best heading I’ve ever written.
Speaking of the end of the world and rapture music
Here are two probably more hideous songs than anything the Third Eagle might produce. Both are covers of The Final Countdown, which Arrested Development made one of the most annoying songs to be stuck in my head for all time.
New Third Eagle song: now with more waterfalls
Typical rapture rock.
Also. This important analysis of an Obama poem…
Convergence and Conversation: When the main thing is talking about the thing, not the thing itself
Sacha Baron Cohen has a new movie out, and by all accounts it’s incredibly puerile and terrible. I’m not going to see it. Borat was enough for me. I’ve always had a soft spot for Baron Cohen and the way he used outlandish characters to highlight the outlandish traits in normal people, as uncomfortable as that became. But his kind of under the radar shock humour, luring unsuspecting victims into making fools of themselves, always had a limited shelf life as his notoriety increased. I reckon he actually peaked with Ali G. Who is, for mine, the funniest interviewer ever.
It seems though that to create genuinely funny humour of the type he had become accustomed, Baron Cohen had to create a terrible movie that then became the vehicle for catching people unaware and reproducing some of his shock comedy, in character.
So, we have examples like this train wreck on the Today Show. I’ll embed it. But watch it at your own risk, it’s crude and it’s simply here to illustrate a point. It’s some of the most uncomfortable breakfast television you’ll ever see.
Baron Cohen is maintaining his brand – people will still think of him as an edgy, and funny, comedian who puts people in awkward situations, this time journalists, because of the press circus surrounding the movie. The TV opportunities are now the vehicle for his comedy. I’m no more likely to see the movie because of moments like this, but at least it has generated the kind of response I’m sure Baron Cohen enjoys most. It’s where the art is now. I wouldn’t be surprised if his press appearances become the main reason people buy the DVD version of the movie, so it’s a tactic with a bit of a silver lining.
Here’s how a boingboing review (which contains a vivid description of the offensiveness of the movie in the opening para) describes what’s going on:
“This is what The Dictator was made for; to spew, into the world of the living, the fully-formed obscenity that is Aladeen.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters come into their own when they are put into contact with real people—and even chat show hosts are people—because, as Ali G taught us, the embarassing reaction and our own cringing is at least half of the humour, innit.”
This is an interesting theory – treating content creation as a launchpad for something more long term.
As a media strategy it’s not bad – particularly in the social media world where engagement and conversation are the big goals that lead to conversion. The idea is that you develop loyal fans of your brand who purchase your products and become advocates who talk about your product to their friends. You do that by producing content they want to share, or content that gets people talking. And the movie and associated interviews have ticked that box.
This has me thinking a bit about how this principle applies to church communication and social media stuff. I’m doing a bit of thinking at the moment about how the church I’m part of can use Facebook better, and get people being ambassadors not just for our church, but for Jesus, when they’re online (incidentally, there’s a great Church Marketing Sucks post/series on this).
This is one thing I reckon Mark Driscoll does really well. He’s phenomenal not just at scouting out opportunities in the press, but creating them. I have started to wonder if that is why he and wife Grace went so far and were so graphic in their marriage book – for the shock factor. It’s pretty much the Christian equivalent of the Dictator. The book flew up the best sellers list, fanned the flames of controversy around the Christian blogosphere earlier this year (seriously, google it), it certainly had people talking, and Mark and Grace Driscoll have been touring the US on the back of the book seemingly ever since – including this amazing stopover on CNN with Piers Morgan, who’s not a massively successful TV superstar, but still gets around 500,000 viewers a night.
This isn’t all of it – you can read a transcript here. It’s pretty much a mix of everything that’s good and bad about Mark Driscoll.
“MORGAN: But why was — why should it be one rule for her and one rule for you?
DRISCOLL: I think I was selfish and I think I was being a hypocrite. And I’m not going to defend things that I’ve done or said or thought that were wrong. No.
But I do believe — and this is where we’re going to get to Jesus — that he died, he rose, he forgives me, he helps me, and I hope to keep changing and doing better.
MORGAN: But for people watching this, you know, especially younger people, for example. They said, well, it’s all right for you. You know, you had all this sex until you were 19, then you get —
DRISCOLL: Well, it wasn’t a lot of —
MORGAN: Then you got born-again so you had sort of sown your wild oats and then — and then you’ve become a born-again virgin. But for them, you’re trying to punish them and they can’t have anything.
DRISCOLL: Well, I think, ultimately, sex is best reserved for marriage. And I think if you look at the statistics of sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, there’s a lot of people that are suffering, too.
…
I mean you’re not your average pastor, are you?DRISCOLL: I don’t know.
MORGAN: Saying stuff like that.
DRISCOLL: I have fun. Sometimes I get it wrong.
MORGAN: Do too many people in the world of religion take it too seriously?
Is that part of the problem?
DRISCOLL: I think we should take Jesus seriously. We should take the Bible seriously. We probably shouldn’t take ourselves nearly as seriously. And that’s how I approach it.
MORGAN: Do you think you’re a tolerant kind of guy?
DRISCOLL: I love people very much and it’s — it’s —
MORGAN: That’s not the same thing.
DRISCOLL: Well, it’s — how do you disagree, sometimes, with people that you love?
That’s a very difficult issue for everybody, but for a pastor in particular, because —
MORGAN: But do you preach tolerance?
DRISCOLL: I’ve preached that we should love our neighbor, that we should accept —
MORGAN: But tolerance — tolerance in particular.
DRISCOLL: Why — you keep hammering it. What — what do you mean by tolerance?
MORGAN: Tolerating people who may have a lifestyle or a belief that you don’t agree with.
DRISCOLL: Yes, we have to. And that’s — when Jesus says love your neighbor, you know, he knows you’re not going to agree with all your neighbors, but he wants you to love them, to seek good for them, to care for them.
…
However, like everything in life, shouldn’t it be dragged kicking and screaming into each modern era, and be adapted, like the American Constitution.DRISCOLL: Yes.
MORGAN: Because, you know, my — my view about this is — is not that I don’t respect Christians or Catholics or whoever who — who absolutely swear by every word in here. It’s just that it’s — I just don’t believe anyone who is genuinely Christian should be spouting bigoted opinions about sections of the community for their sexuality.
DRISCOLL: Well, I think when it comes to the Bible, you’ve got three options. Take it, I believe what it says. Leave it, I don’t believe what it says. Or change it —
MORGAN: Or adapt — or adapt the wording —
DRISCOLL: Which would be the changing it.
…MORGAN: If it was in — the majority of Americans believed in it, would you then go along with it?
DRISCOLL: Would I officiate same-sex weddings and things of that nature?
MORGAN: Yes.
DRISCOLL: I couldn’t, according to conscience, no.
I think the big issue for families in America is really men who walk out on their families. I mean, right now, the average child born to a woman under 30 is born out of wedlock —
MORGAN: Yes, but that’s why —
DRISCOLL: — with no father.
MORGAN: — see, that’s my whole point about this. There are so many feckless guys out there —
DRISCOLL: That’s really —
MORGAN: — right?”
I’ve gone a bit nuts with the quotes – but I reckon this is a great example of public engagement that is both Christ focused, and engages with social issues. Which is what Driscoll does best. This interview almost makes the (by all accounts justifiable) controversy around the book worthwhile. And like Baron Cohen’s work one wonders if Driscoll produced the book with half an eye on how things would play out past its release.
The third little example takes the form of a book review, a public discourse between critic and author, the book is Ross Douhat’s Bad Religion
None of these cases simply involve the content producer reproducing their content – in each case there’s a development of the core concept before a wider audience, that adds value. It’s good stuff. And now I’m wondering how this works at the level of the local church – how we turn the content we produce regularly (sermons etc), into sharable chunks, or leverage the work on new mediums.
Anyway. That’s a long post about some stuff I noticed in some stuff I read.
Call it sore losing… but I wish Origin was about the game not the tribal stuff
Cultural anthropologists would have a field day if Facebook walls were physical and people were looking at what happens in May/June in Australia each year with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight.
I love sport. I love league. And I enjoy watching Origin even when my team loses. Which for the last seven years has been a pretty regular phenomenon. I enjoy a bit of the tribal aspect of sport. I get it. But I wonder at what point the “otherising” that goes on alongside sporting success is healthy – both within the Christian community and as an indicator of our culture more broadly. I get that winning is fun. Nobody likes losing, and nobody likes when a team they have some affiliation with – by choice, or by birth, loses.
But it’s a game. A sport. A contest between 17 guys who have been chosen not as representatives of a state and all that it stands for, but as 17 guys who the selectors hope will beat the other 17 guys and provide a modicum of entertainment for the masses. To invest a game of football with inane tribal parochialism is to explain why the intellectual set get dismissive of sport.
If, as Tim Keller suggests, idolatry is what happens when we take good things and make them ultimate things, then for about 6 weeks of the year, football becomes an idol for the vast majority of Queenslanders. Now it may be true that New South Welshman are just as guilty of this – I don’t know, I can’t really remember the last time New South Wales won a series, and I certainly can’t remember when New South Wales won the last series while I lived there. But I think our culture is shifting in Australia to the point where to be an “other” in Queensland, even amongst Christian circles, is an interesting and character revealing experience. It’s also an interesting, and completely non-scientific, exercise to look at what my NSW friends have been talking about on Facebook in the last 48 hours, and what my Queensland friends have been posting.
It’s possible that this is something that should be reflected on with more distance from the event, and the experience, so that accusations of “sour grapes” and hypocrisy are less likely… but from where I’m sitting, reluctantly in the trenches as a New South Wales supporter not really savouring the prospect of a seventh year of defeat, and the parochial vicarious gloating that comes with it, from residents of a state with an in-built siege mentality based on some sort of inferiority complex, a state where an unpopular Premier is lauded for getting up during a natural disaster and rousing the proletariat’s collective spirit with the tearful catch-cry “we are Queenslanders,” as though the post code one lives in is somehow a determinant of character… what’s going on isn’t really healthy (nor is the length of this incredibly complex sentence). Somehow we’ve allowed where we live, and where we’re from, to become an acceptable idol, a point of difference, something that is acceptably the butt of jokes, where to replace the punchline with other differences would probably be in breach of vilification laws around the country.
I’m not really setting out to be a killjoy, nor am I particularly offended by these examples of humour… it’s funny though, every time I say, on Facebook, or in person, that I don’t really care about the result – people call that into question. Sure. I watch the game. I like it better if we win. But I don’t lose sleep over it, and I’m certainly not going to run around producing a bunch of meme styled photos when, as it is historically inevitable, New South Wales eventually wins a series. I talk about it. I post the occasional Facebook status as part of the fun, and sometimes to bait Queenslanders into doing exactly what I’m accusing them of here – buying into cheap tribal parochialism, just so that I can turn the table on them and exert some sort of enlightened cultural superiority in a post on my blog.
Being from New South Wales means transcending the silliness of the short man syndrome that is identifying primarily by the state that you come from.
In conclusion, while I think I can say, without a shadow of hypocrisy, that I don’t care about the game at least in the way that Queenslanders do, I do care about the reaction to the result, and about the bizarre situation where suddenly it’s ok to make jokes about an other on the basis of the success of the people you affiliate yourself with. I am wondering what they say about the human condition, and about our culture more broadly.
That is all.
Record business: these vinyl trick shots are amazing
Wow. No seriously. Wow.
Who sits around and says to themselves “you know what we should do, we should throw our records from all sorts of angles and get them to land on a record player”…