When fiction becomes real: Miranda Devine and the ‘banning’ of girls
Wander about on social media long enough and you’ll see new truths and realities congealing out of air. Poke around the right corners of Twitter long enough and you’ll see the talking points for the next Sky News guest verbatim, the next media panic in utero, the next QandA script half written.
Last week Miranda Devine, Australia’s most successful shortform fantasy writer, cobbled together a piece of fiction in the Tele about Cheltenham Girls’ High School banning the word ‘girls’ in favour of ‘gender-inclusive’ language. It’s so obviously fiction, the premise refutes itself — a girls’ high school cannot ban the word girls. It’s in the damn name. Devine’s article has all the conservative scandal-making tropes in place. It starts with a vague reference to a pre-existing outrage (some parents have complained…) which doesn’t exist yet because the article itself is needed to generate the outrage. Then there are numerous ‘quotes’ from anonymous students and parents who fear ‘a backlash’ from the intolerant pro-LGBTQI students and teachers. The only named quote in the whole fever dream comes from the NSW education minister, Adrian Piccoli, himself a conservative, dismissing the whole thing as ridiculous. But he in turn is dismissed as ridiculous by Devine.
Only a few days later Buzzfeed Australia, an outlet which is getting increasingly excellent at real journalism, sent a reporter out to interview actual people with real names from the school, debunking the whole sorry nonsense. Then a MediaWatch piece on the ABC sliced up the whole fantasy in forensic detail — Devine even admitted on the radio that she heard from the ‘parents’ in her article second-hand. She didn’t speak to anyone. Case closed, right? The truth is finally out there. Bam, done. Justice. Nailed it. Sucked in, Devine!
No. This is no victory. Both the Buzzfeed and MediaWatch pieces are excellent, but Devine is playing a different game and she already won. She’s far smarter than us. She gets it — there is no truth, there are only stories. In Devine’s blog/op-ed column on the Tele website she continued to write about the growing scandal she herself had willed into being. Now with her creation having achieved maturity she really gets stuck in, peppering her post with words like ‘Orwellian,’ ‘cover up,’ ‘authoritarian,’ all to build her case against the real enemy — the ‘Marxist academics’ who created the Safe Schools anti-bullying resources. Devine even goes for a fictional, multicultural double-play: an anonymous quote from ‘a Muslim parent’ and reference to ‘some Chinese parents’ signing a petition against Safe Schools. Immigration be praised, non-whites have their uses after all.
The circle completed itself when Lyle Shelton of the Australian Christian Lobby (a man who has made an entire career out of going on TV every week to complain about not being heard) tweeted Devine’s post to his followers, along with all the usual tropes of his people’s sacred narrative: the bullying, intolerant Left; the silent majority too scared to speak; Christians in chains; gays triumphant. Thanks for speaking out, Miranda!
That none of this is real misses the point entirely: the liberal Left (by which I mean you and me, your John Oliver watching, mainstream Democrat voting, I like things the way they are but a little bit fairer, Guardian/SMH reading, Tim Minchin loving, ‘Waleed Aly nailed it’ progressive person) honestly thinks facts and reason will win in the end. But they won’t! Outside of certain laboratories, facts are just tools for creating narratives, bricks in a bigger wall. The mainstream liberal/left doesn’t understand this at all. No one ever won a damn thing in social and political spheres with facts and reason alone (the best writing on this, for my money, is Emmett Rensin’s article on ‘the smug style in Liberalism’ and its obsession with ‘the good facts’).
Forget this ‘post-truth politics’ stuff, facts have never been that important in politics — and make no mistake, media is politics. Politics is really about values, prejudices, emotions, gut instincts, and powerful narratives that support your goals in the struggle for power. You can’t fight this war with facts alone. To give you an example of the weakness of this approach, look at John Oliver’s most recent piece about the Republican National Convention. He spends 10 minutes obsessing painstakingly over the way Trump and Newt Gingrich throw facts to the wind. How much time does he spend on combating the terrifying, fascist narrative of Trump’s convention? 1 minute (seriously, it starts at 10:18 on the video). This approach is both terrible strategy and morally twisted: deporting Muslims is bad, but if you can’t interpret crime statistics properly I don’t want to know you.
Lyle Shelton may have less colour and charisma than a photocopy of a photocopy, but he understands that truth is only what you make it. Miranda Devine is a master of her black art, spinning savage worlds into being week after week. And while we’re busy debunking her nonsense with facts and reason she writes again, shapes another fiction, and as it goes to print we’re still fact-checking and scoffing and de-bunking the last piece. Her readers lap it up, narratives tailor-made for them and written in the language they speak. Shared and linked and re-posted over and over, seeping into the framework of minds, sharpening on tongues and keyboards across the country. Becoming real.
All this started just because some teenagers at a high school formed a Queer/Straight alliance so they could make their school a kinder and better place. That narrative, compelling and beautiful and true, is of little interest to the Devines and Sheltons of the world. And yet this is the place where their fictions most fully become real: when they harm the innocent.
