Drongos
Without so much as a flicker of self-awareness, pro-Goodes, anti-masses commentators simultaneously bemoan prejudiced football followers who generalise about whole groups of people before going on to make sweeping generalisations about a whole group of people: working-class whites, the kind who don’t read the Ageor own a Nespresso.
These ‘drongos’, as Francis Leach of the Agebranded them (drongo being a famous insult that has its origins in animalism: it was the name of a lame racehorse of the 1920s), show that football has become a ‘redneck wonderland’. Leach branded this amorphous blob of rednecks as ‘obnoxious school kids’, who are probably really angry over ‘the spiralling price of a pie at the footy or the quality of the rubbish beer you force yourself to drink’. They’re uncultured, you see, these beastly drongos. Not like Leach, who doesn’t eat pies and no doubt prefers Pinot Gris to bad beer.
A Guardian hack looked down sniffily at the dark underbelly of Aussie society, where apparently odd, gruff people lurk and spout claptrap. The ‘murky waters’ in which bad people swim. Over at sports website the Roar, Elias Clure slammed the ‘uneducated and misinformed drivel’ that swirls around football, fuelling its ‘subtle racism’. He said the ‘less educated’ folk who attend football matches – Them, the Other, Not Us – are having their ‘racially motivated vitriol’ stirred up by the right-wing media. They’re sponges, you see, thoughtlessly soaking up and regurgitating the prejudices of others. Monkey see, monkey do.