The Wardman Wire

From Mr Eugenides:

Cracking stuff at Guardian Towers, where CiF have been running a series of pieces to mark the close of the decade under the rubric “I’ve changed my mind about…”. Each article cleaves to the same basic formula: “I used to believe in x, but now I believe y, for reasons z1, z2, z3″ and so on.

This being the Guardian, of course, the series provides rich comedy on a number of levels. So I’ve developed a little game to help you enjoy it in full.

It’s really very simple. What you do is read the headline – I’ve changed my mind about the Soviet Union, say – and try to guess the values of x, y and z in the formula. What did the author think before, what do they think now, and why the change in heart?

…

“To recap: your challenge is to guess whether the Guardian author was a complete fucking idiot until a recent and long-overdue epiphany, or whether they spent most of their lives being vaguely sensible until someone laced their beansprouts with LSD and turned them into fuckwits.”

Hours of fun await

I think it’s a study in two things:

1 – People assuming that they were right, then being mugged by reality/experience. The Myth of The Fall has a lot to be said for it, in that it is a reminder that we all start with feet of clay.

2 – The need to generate argument to create controversy to justify the existence of the commentator. Apply Occam’s Razor, and half of the commentary in the media would spontaneously evaporate; now, there’s an encouraging thought for New Year.