Why our mushroom murder trial fixation is a sign of hope
Australians have been fixated on criminal trials before, but those can mostly be traced to universal themes and shared emotions. The backpacker murders and the outback killing of Peter Falconio played to deep Wake In Fright fears about the wide brown land. Kathleen Folbigg's and Keli Lane's trials touched the nerve of maternal filicide. Lindy Chamberlain's trials combined both.
The public fascination with the mushroom lunch trial was different. There is something broader to be said about in-laws and cooking, but it was the trial's very singularity, its bizarre uniqueness, that connected it to the times we are living in. What does it have to do with us? How does it affect us? Nothing and not at all. When we are waking up each morning to discover what new atrocities were committed overnight, when we are asked whether nuclear war, artificial intelligence or climate change is the greatest threat to humanity, the mushroom lunch trial was trivia. But this is why it gripped so many of us, and it was actually a good thing.
While pondering why I'm suddenly so well informed about beef Wellington, wild mushrooms and dehydrators, I came across a New York Times essay by Ken Jennings, host of the TV quiz show Jeopardy!, now in its 61st unbroken year. Since taking over from Alex Trebeck in 2020, Jennings had asked himself if such quizzes could 'survive the conspiracy theories and fake news of our post-fact era'.
'Facts may seem faintly old-timey in the 21st century,' Jennings wrote, 'remnants of the rote learning style that went out of fashion in classrooms (and that the internet search made obsolete) decades ago.'
But if you look around, trivia quizzes – and therefore facts – have never been more popular. Media is spiced with quizzes for the reason that they suck in audiences. We get stirred up about the ambiguous wording of a question in the Good Weekend Superquiz. Pub trivia, imported from Britain since the 1970s, is booming among 18- to 25-year-olds. And let's not get started on those of us (guilty!) who use our phones less as communications devices than as pocket encyclopedias. 'Hold that thought, let me see what shows we've seen him/her in.' 'Don't mind me, I'm just checking.'
As annoying as it can be, this behaviour does mean something. 'Trivia is far from trivial,' Jennings writes. He would say that, wouldn't he? But the supporting evidence is enlightening.
It was January 22, 2017, when Kellyanne Conway, an adviser in the first Trump administration, defended spokesman Sean Spicer's false claims about the crowd size at Trump's inauguration. Chuck Todd, host of Meet The Press, asked Conway how Spicer could 'utter a provable falsehood'. Conway replied that Spicer was providing 'alternative facts'. Todd said: 'Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods.'
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