âWe have to do betterâ: AFL CEO
AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan has condemned Eddie McGuireâs controversial comments aimed at journalist Caroline Wilson. Courtesy: ABC News24
PT2M8S 620 349It's nobody's business but Collingwood's whether they decide to get rid of Eddie McGuire after this latest humiliating episode of deep crevice arse-face. Then again it's nobody's business but ours whether we judge him for it.
It's hard to say that McGuire, a serial offender against good manners and simple decency, went too far with this latest fiasco, a rhetorical assault on sports writer and broadcaster Caroline Wilson, because he's gone too far too many times to have any sort of sensible baseline against which to judge him.
McGuire, as always, gives every impression of seeing himself as the aggrieved party. It was all just a bit of fun. He was only kidding. Cor blimey, the braying laughter of his stooges and toadies as he joked about drowning Wilson proves it. We wuz just havin' a bit of a larf, guvnor!
Eddie McGuire. Photo: Scott Barbour
The bully always laughs as they hold your head under and flush the toilet. To be fair, from their perspective, it really is a jolly old wheeze.
Step back, however, and it doesn't seem so funny.
Put yourself in the place of the one who's supposed to grin and bear it as their head gets jammed deep into the S-bend and the humour can seem a little… forced.
Maybe it's just me, but the behaviour of McGuire and his idiot stooges (yeah, everyone forgets the idiot stooges, but their moronic chorus of hurr-hurr-hurr is an integral part of the 'fun') looked very much like sexist bullying. As a middle class white man my personal experience of sexist bullying is pretty thin, so I'm admittedly reaching here, but lets reach for my trusty Macquarie Dictionary:
Bully. (n) 1. "A blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who browbeats smaller or weaker people"
2. Someone who intimidates or demeans another, especially as by repeated threats to their person career, or social standing, or by harassment in person, on social networks, etc.
I don't know that I'd be comfortable describing Wilson as smaller or weaker than McGuire. It seems somehow wrong. And there's no universe in which Adam Goodes, another target of McGuire's oafish sense of humour, can truthfully be perceived as smaller or weaker than Collingwood's president. Except of course Wilson is a woman, and Goodes is black and the fact that this wealthy, privileged munting clown thinks making jokes at their expense is not just acceptable, but actually funny, goes a long way towards explaining why sexism and racism remain a live issue for so many people.
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