NUT

Or take Liz Jones' piece from Jan 22nd.

It has all the hallmarks of a serious Daily Mail rant by a Phillips or a Littlejohn or a Hitchens. Absurd generalisations from single pieces of data. Conspiracy theory. Obsession with brands and and trade names. Paranoia. Bizarrely overblown language. Slow build up to hysterical crescendo. But the subject of the piece is, er, Liz Jones feeding the birds in her garden. (It seems that someone has written a letter asking her to keep her cats indoors during the birds' nesting season. Written a letter! To Liz Jones! Don't they know who she is?)

A Daily Mail journalist cannot write "My local shop ran out of peanuts". She has to write "There is a world wide peanut shortage". She cannot be caught feeding breadcrumbs to the birdies: she must let it be known that she gives them "Carrot cake from Costa Coffee." It may, for all I know be true that hedgehogs are being culled. It may even be true that some farmers and some wildlife management experts are culling them over zealously or that there are two sides to the argument about whether the cull is necessary. But that's how Nature sometimes works. If there are more animals in a particular forest then that forest can sustain, or if one species is in danger of eating all the other species in the area, then you kill some animals to bring numbers down to a sustainable level. Even if they are cute. But Liz Jones cannot bring herself to say "kill". She can't bring herself to say "cull". She cannot bring herself to say "being culled in unnecessarily high numbers."

The word she uses is "persecution".

The gist of the piece is that the English are inconsistent in their attitude to animals. The Royal Family wear fur and go hunting, but are patrons of animal welfare charities; organizations like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds campaign for the preservation of rare species but not for less common, less exotic ones -- presumably because they are in no actual danger of becoming extinct. 

It is perfectly possible to be very concerned about conservation and nevertheless go hunting. Liz Jones is confused about the difference between prolonging the lives of particular, individual birdies, and wanting to preserve entire species and entire ecosystems. Hunting's only a problem -- from a conservation point of view -- if you in danger of wiping out a whole species. You may still think it's cruel, or bad for the hunter's karma, but that's a seperate question. Poor Prince Phillip was once asked how he could be a patron of the RSPB when he hunted pheasant and he found himself saying "Pheasants are in absolutely no danger from people who shoot pheasants." But it was actually a perfectly reasonable comment.

Liz engages liberally in the rhetorical device known as Advanced Whatabouting: where any claim that "X is reprehensible" can be deflected by saying "What about Y? Isn't Y also reprehensible? Why aren't you talking about Y? " Why are the people who are concerned about her cats killing rare birds not exercising themselves about the welfare of battery chickens? You'd expect a charity set up to preserve rare bird to be worried about the welfare of farm animals, wouldn't you?  Whatabout chickens. Chickens have feathers.

So far so banal: but it eventually builds up to a pitch which is so over the top, so absurd, that it cannot possibly be meant seriously. It must be a joke at the expense of other columnists in her newspaper.

The language starts shrill:

"It (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) fetishizes the rare while it is happy for the many to be persecuted"

But then it becomes hysterical:

"The RSPB is peopled by pure-breed fascists who think nothing of annihilating a species for their own elitist reasons" 

"For their own elitist reasons" could very well replace deus et mon droit as the motto on the Daily Mail masthead. Whether it's birdwatchers, G.Ps or local councillors you can be absolutely sure that they have "their own, elitist reasons" for keeping cats indoors, vaccinating children or putting litter bins on the high-street. 

It gets even more hysterical:

"Like New Labour [animal charities] have become dizzy with power"

And then actually deranged:

"They have their own view of ecological harmony which the common, the photogenic, are just not part of"

This is all classic Daily Mail stuff. Of course the opinion of a sentimental fashion columnist who likes to put out crumbs of chocolate cake for the ickle birdies counts for more than that of informed environmentalists who want to prevent unique species and delicate ecosystems from become extinct.  (The RSPB have, for some secret reason "accused and convicted" a species of rat of killing lots of puffins. Liz Jones knows better. If the bird experts had asked the newspaper columnist, she could have put them straight.)   

Of course the fact that the hedgehog is "beloved by the public" overrides the view of the experts that, in some places, there are too many of them. "Expert" is one of the most damning terms of abuse in the Daily Mel lexicon. It is not too long since people were defending the anti-vaccination campaign on the grounds that it was elitist for medical professionals to say that the MMR vaccine was harmless when ordinary people felt that it was dangerous. We should be given the medicine we want, not the medicine that doctors tell us will make us well.   

Of course whatever is done is done deliberately, by a sinister brigade or elite or -ism with an ulterior motive.  

Of course an animal protection society which thinks that cats hunt birds must have an agenda. Elitism. The exercise of power for power's sake. A wish to destroy the foundations of British society. (Richard Littlejohn apparently believes that local council officials positively look for ways to stop people from having fun because they get a sexual kick out of it.)

But the Liz Jones character is applying this paranoid Daily Mel language -- persecution, orchestrated, indigenous, fascist, elitist, dizzy with power -- to someone who told her to keep her cats indoors when birds were nesting and who jolly well ought to have known that her cats are a special case. Her cats are nice cats. Her cats have never killed bird in their life. And Whatabout all the wild cats. Wouldn't it be better to neuter them than to write letters to me? Don't you know who I am? Don't you know who I AM.

My cats aren't a danger, says the headline. The Power Crazed RSPB is.

The power-crazed RSPB.

The power-crazed RSPB.

The.

Power.

Crazed.

RSPB.

This can't be meant seriously.

It can't be meant seriously.

It can't be meant seriously.

Liz Jones is, in fact, a parody of Melanie Philips. 

JOKE

I think that I may have been "had" by Liz Jones.

British newspapers fairly often print spoofs, and people fairly often get taken in by them. The Independent is currently running a satirical column by Talbot Church "the man the Royals trust". If Private Eye is to be believed, several of his most far-fetched spoof stories have been followed-up by serious royal reporters.  If that isn't a contradiction in terms. For years, the Guardian ran a column by one Bel Littlejohn: however outrageously right-on her views became, readers failed to realize that her columns were an exercise in self-parody, not to say self-flagellation.

Melanie Phillips, on the other hand, is a real person.

People can also become conscious parodies of themselves. Auberon Waugh's personal values were undoubtedly consonant with the ones he expressed in his newspaper columns: nostalgic, Catholic, aristocratic. But his print persona took these views to such bizarre extremes that they couldn't possibly have been what he really believed. (The problems with the health service stem from greedy nurses who expect to be paid for work any decent human being would undertake for nothing; corporal punishment ought to be retained because teachers have a difficult job and deserve some fun from time to time). They were clever and witty columns, although it wasn't always easy to work out where the joke lay. Jeremy Clarkson uses much the same technique today, only without the "clever" and "witty" part.

It's a dangerous game to play, though. You always risk being taken seriously. People would sometimes come up to Warren Mitchell (who played the appalling Alf Garnett for 30 years) and say "I loved the way you were having a go at all those nig-nogs on TV last night.".

"I wasn't having a go at the nig-nogs" he would reply. "I was having a go at ignorant arseholes like you." 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWKy4RHf5tQ&feature=player_embedded

Now, after reading her Daily Mail column about the Clifton murder, I naturally assumed that Liz Jones was a vacuous middle class snob, whose column was intended to appeal to other vacuous middle class snobs. I think I erred. I think her column is a parody of a column by a vacuous middle-class snob: a joke at the expense of vacuous middle-class Daily Mail readers in the same way that Bel Littlejohn was a joke at the expense of leftier-than-thou Guardian readers.

Melanie Phillips, on the other hand,  is probably a real person.

It was her new year column that alerted me to the fact that Liz Jones cannot possibly intend us to take her seriously.

It was full of this kind of stuff:

"My moan of the year has to be reserved for NatWest, the unhelpful bank that refused to let me withdraw £20 to buy pet food. At the end of this year, I received a letter from another costumer to say that he had been refused a £400 loan to bury his son, who had been killed in a hit and run. Shame on you, you evil money-grubbers."

Modern life is full of minor inconveniences. When I shout at the automatic till in Sainsburies ("It's a pint of effing milk! It can't be that unexpected! People must come in here and buy milk all the time!") I'm not really expecting it to answer. I am expressing frustration. If anything I'm making a joke against myself, for being so pointlessly annoyed by a bit of machinery which doesn't work. Most of us sometimes feel frustrated in the face of machines, rules and bureaucracy. We always feel that there is a special reason why the rules should not apply to us, and are annoyed that bureaucrats won't treat us as a special case. Of course the aerial repair man is going to come out more urgently, and charge less money to fix my TV if I explain to him that my Doctor Who reviews are read by literally dozens of people. If I explain my employment circumstances to a minimum wage bank teller, then of course he will allow me withdraw money beyond my agreed overdraft limit. Of course Mr Branson will delay his train by an extra five minute to give me a chance to retrieve the wallet I dropped at the ticket office.

Lots of people have spotted that bureaucracy can be particularly heartless when dealing with bereavement. The are lots of stories about recent widows getting letters addressed to "Mr John Smith, deceased". On the other hand, the process of probate is quite complicated: if I walk into the bank and say "I want a £1,000 out of my Mum's account so I can bury her" the bank is very likely to reply "We'd like some evidence that she's really dead, and that you are really her son, please." This is why insurance companies offer cheap life assurance for the over 50s, payable upon death, along with an attractive carriage clock yours to keep however you decide.

The bit about needing £400 "to bury his son" is pretty obviously a terminological inexactitude. Funeral directors don't refuse to bury you if you don't pay upfront. They do the work, and then, several weeks later, they send you the bill. They are quite good at treating bereaved people in a sensitive way. They've had a lot of practice.

And if you can't afford £400, that doesn't mean your son goes unburied. It means social service help you out. There is no such thing as a pauper's funeral.  

If you aren't eligible for a loan, then you aren't eligible for a loan. You aren't more eligible for a loan because your loved one was the victim of a hit and run than you would have been if he had been the victim of a responsible driver who had pulled over, called 999, and waited for the police.

But the really weird thing is the way that Liz leaps from her correspondent's sad story to her own, ludicrously trivial one. Did she really need £20 to feed a cat? Couldn't Tiddles have had some Happy Shopper food from the corner shop for one night? Couldn't she have mashed up some human food in the mincer, or borrowed something from next door? Did she really think the bank would open specially, or let her go overdrawn just because Tiddles is one of the nine out of ten cats who prefer Whiskers? If you are so stupid as to be left with no food and no cash no and money in the bank, does that really make the bank "evil" (a word more commonly associated with war criminals and serial killers).

And do you really think that there some comparison between "feeding the cat" and "arranging my son's funeral"?

It's in poor taste. It's not very funny. But it is surely intended as a joke -- a parody of the me, me, me mindset of certain columnists, diarists and, admittedly,  bloggers.

It is, on the other hand,  just possible that Melanie Philips is a real person.









UPDATE: Oh god, it's more complicated than that. At the point at which the evil moneygrubbing bank wouldn't give her £20, she apparently reached the end of a £15,000 overdraft. She was so deeply in debt that her readers started to send her money. Old ladies send her tenners out of their pensions. (What do you reckon a key brand-name columnist workign for the second best selling paper in the country takes home in a year? £80K?)  And she feeds her cats Marks and Spencers organic prawns. All of which tends to confirm the "Bel Littlejohn" theory. Doesn't it?

FUCK

Some people talk about "The F-Bomb". They say that when someone uses a particular Anglo Saxon word in their hearing, they feel as if they'd been punched in the face.

Other people don't seem to notice. For them, swear-words are not even exclamation marks, they're just commas. The F-word is a bit of random noise to fill up spaces in their sentences, like "Well" and "Er...." and "Hey Nonny No!"

Have you noticed, incidentally, that young people have taken to saying "Know-what-I-mean-innit" in the gaps where normal people used to say "Well, to be quite honest..." or "So I say to her, I says, I says, I says." In every generation, people in their forties have thought that people in their twenties were stupid, vulgar and inarticulate. In our generation, it's actually true.

Most people come somewhere in the middle: they remember when hearing the F-word was like having a bomb explode in their face. They don't feel that way now, particularly, but because they remember when they did, they think it's bad manners and socially unacceptable to say it very often.

Words change their intensities, of course. Quite possibly, "damn" really was as shocking to your Granny as f**k was to you; and quite possible f**k is as harmless to kids nowadays as "damn" was to you. When Henry Higgins said "I never swear. What the devil to you mean?" he was making a joke. Very nearly. 

Peter Elbow thinks that probably all words used to be like that. The word "sun" was warm and happy and bright, just as the word "shit" was smelly and embarrassing and disgusting. It's the job of a good writer to reconnect words with their meanings. The best possible writing would be a verbal firework display of a-bombs, b-bombs and c-bombs exploding in your face.

I myself have started to wonder if the best way dealing with the professional communicators in the church, the press and (especially) the house of commons who use words only in order to prevent us form finding out what they actually mean would be to talk, as far as possible, in those short, simple powerful words that our ancestors bequeathed to us: sheep rather than mutton, beat rather than chastise, wank rather than peruse certain very tastful adult websites. Would the various recent  scandals public life have got as far as they did if M.Ps and bankers had been used to simple words like lie, cheat and steal? I was most taken with a children's writer on Go4It some years ago, who explained to the kids that he had written the word "BUM" on a post-it-note and stuck to his computer. This was to remind himself that you should never use a long, difficult word like "posterior" when there is a short, simple word that everybody knows. (Unless, he added, there is some special reason why only "posterior" will do.)

The same thing is probably true about nakedness. In between the person who thinks "Oh my god! A man's taken has pants off ! And not even turned his back! Cover my eyes! Where shall I look! I feel dirty and violated!" and the one thinks "I wish you 'textiles' would explain the the differnece between Ian McKellen exposing his penis at the National Theater and Ian McKellen exposing, say, his knees" are five people who think "Hmm...you seem to have broken a social convention there. That makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, if only because it might make other people uncomfortable. I wonder if it will turn out to have been artisitcally necessary..." (*)


Some people claim not to be able to watch screen violence, even if it's in a serious and worthwhile artistic context like Kick-Ass and The Passion of the Christ. They know (I assume) that it's all a trick, and that no-one is really being tortured, but they still react to it as if they were watching something horrible. Or again: there's always a moment in Fraiser (Best. Sit-com. Ever) where I'm literally covering my face with my hands and squirming, because I can see what appallingly embarrassing situation Dr Crane is about to well meaningly blunder into. Kevin once told me that he couldn't watch the programme for that reason: the character's social embarrassment was so awful he couldn't laugh at it. I keep it at arms length: I squirm while I'm watching it, but can put it away again afterwards. The same is true of suspense and horror, I guess: if you aren't, at some level, actually experiencing what it would be like to be in a creaky old house with a murderer hiding in the attic, then the film is simply dull. If you experience it too intensely -- as if it really was happening to you -- then the movie is not fun, but unpleasant. Traumatic, even.

People who really dislike violent movies can't make this distinction: and they don't believe taht anybody else could make it either. I can't imagine why you would want to see a movie in which a man has his ear cut off, they say. How would you like it if I cut off your ear?  

The Rev Steven Green recently pretended to be unable to distinguish between the proposition: "Certain characters in a BBC drama about the birth of Jesus said, wrongly, that his mother Mary was guilty of fornication" and "The Communist controlled Darwin worshipping BBC said that Jesus' mother, Mary, was guilty of fornication." He pretended to be  very offended indeed.

I personally doubt if many of the people who claim to be "offended" by glimpsing a bottom on prime time TV are really experiencing that kind of visceral shock. I think that "I am offended" is a tactical reaction. I think that, for various political or idealogical reasons, they think that bottoms ought not to be shown on the BBC under any circumstances whatsoever. But instead of articulating their philosophical anti-bottomist position they say "Dear Sir, I was offended by your bottom" as if that closed the matter. 

Some people say that we have no right not to be offended. Other people say that we have no right to anything at all and the whole idea of rights was invented by treacherous European communists, intent on bringing down Western Civilisation. So that argument won't get very far.

If "being offended" means "feeling that you've been slapped in the face" then I would have thought that we probably ought to avoid "offending people" as far as possible in the same way that we probably ought to avoid slapping people in the face as far as possible. But that's more a guideline than a rule. Some people need and deserve a slap round the face. People who have written articles in the Daily Mail comparing homosexuality with bestiality, to pick a random example. Nice ladies used to write to the BBC asking them if they would please stop showing all those photographs of bleck pipple starving to death in Africa. They found them upsetting and they put them off their tea. Which, you can't help feeling, was rather the point.

If we said that we would try to stop offending people in the face-slapping sense, you can guarantee that the next day Richard Dawkins or someone would claim, tactically, that Aled Jones offends him so much that he has to put a bandage round his face. And maybe it really does. Is that an argument against hymn singing on BBC 2? I can't help thinking not.   

Everyone creates their enemies in their own image. The Daily Mel teaches that the Political Correctness Brigade first of all persuaded everybody (erroneously) that Intolerance was a very bad thing, and then set about claiming that all the pillars of Western Civilisation -- the church, the family, fox-hunting, swimming pools, etc were Intolerant. But surely that's just attributing to the fictitious  Political Correctness Brigade tactics which the censors and the moral welfare campaigners really have been using for decades. First of all claim that "offending" people is just about the worst thing you can do. Then claim that anything which criticise your class, your religion, your political party or your news paper is "offensive." 

Was I actually "offended" by Liz Jones nasty little piece about the Clifton murder?

No. No, I was not.

But...



(*)Not really, no. I don't think there is much need for King Lear, who is Shakespeare specifically says is not naked, to expose himself, while Edgar, who Shakespeare specifically refers to as "the naked fellow" to keep his pants on. 

Some time ago, I promised I would write something explaining why I found Liz Jones' Daily Mail column about the Clifton murder so offensive.

But instead, I wrote the following: