The other day, I was curious about the elevation of Sweet Home, Oregon. The elevation of small cities in the foothills of the Cascades is important to me. While searching for this prosaic piece of information, I found this block of text, from a site called "Wikipedia" about Sweet Home, Oregon:
According to the city, "Sweet Home is sometimes referred to as the 'Gateway to the Santiam Playground'"
Now, it does qualify this somewhat with "According to the city", but it also stretches credulity. Now, imagine this situation, as two co-workers talk about their
weekend plans:
Carl: "Hey Bob, what are you going to do this weekend?"
Bob: "Oh, I was thinking of going up to the Gateway to the Santiam Playground, what about you?"
Carl: "Oh, you know, get some yardwork done and catch a movie."
We can also imagine the conversation going on, this way:
Carl: "Hey Bob, what are you going to do this weekend?"
Bob: "Oh, I was thinking of going up to the Gateway to the Santiam Playground, what about you?"
Carl: "You are very brave to be so forthright about your identity, and I congratulate you during this pride month for sharing with me, but that also might not be an appropriate topic for work."
Now, to be fair, Sweet Home, Oregon is indeed located close to many recreational opportunities, and would be the last stop before reaching the Willamette National Forest. It is a staging point for excursions. The sentiment makes sense. But the problem here is that something that never exists in reality, a stilted marketing slogan that is hard to imagine coming out of a real person's mouth, is reported as an actual thing. Here, the "Neutral Point of View" that this website seems to espouse seems to mean regurgitating officialese in a very credulous way. There are no "Neutral Points of View", but there are bland points of view. But this "Neutral Point of View" can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with people gradually thinking that whatever is written down represents some type of actual, prevalent view, and the world slowly gets bleached of all its color and reality, a reality where people refer to Sweet Home as "that one place you stop for gas on the way to Bend".