A little while ago, a friend noticed this caption on a picture attached to an Australian newspaper report about overweight police: “No doughnuts: Top cop wants to build a slim blue line.”
My friend asked: “From which comics or TV shows do they get the idea Aussie cops eat doughnuts?”
I guess whoever wrote the caption (or “blockline” as we used to call them in the old days) was thinking of police chief Clancy Wiggum in The Simpsons, whose fondness for doughnuts has been a part of popular Western culture for the past quarter-century. (Although it probably predates that.)
So an observation made by a humourist in America, and perpetuated on a popular TV show, gets somehow transferred into real life in Australia.
The danger is that it becomes accepted as an Australian stereotype, even though it isn’t true. I would venture to suggest that, if Aussie cops are indeed getting fat, it’s more to do with more popular fast foods such as burgers and fried chicken — all be they also largely American — rather than doughnuts.
In a world full of horror and pain, this sort of thing probably doesn’t matter very much — except that, sometime in the future, what is distinctly American will be mistaken as global, and what is uniquely Australian will be absent altogether.
