“I was saddened to read in your Readers’ View page recently of the decision to cancel this year’s Elm Fete on the grounds of onerous Health & Safety paperwork and escalating insurance premiums.
Sadly, this is no one-off. More and more, these days, I hear of people forced to ditch plans to organise a public event or club because the toll taken in terms of paperwork and money is simply too high. I have every sympathy with the Fete organisers but a growing concern about the way in which social life in this country is being stifled by an unholy trinity of insurance firms, Health & Safety mandarins and litigation lawyers who have sadly dropped all pretence of being a cut above their sue-happy American counterparts.
If the H&S people could produce evidence of the carnage caused by summer fetes down the years of course, this would go some way towards allaying my misgivings. It may be that they have filing cabinets full to bursting of tales of slipped discs caused by frantic apple-bobbing, or of innocent people mown down by friendly fire at the coconut shy. Somehow, I doubt it.
What on earth would our ancestors make of us? At a time when our society is less and less about community and more and more about the individual, we cannot even put a village fete on without our plans being effectively thwarted by an alliance of lawyers, paranoid insurers and salaried busybodies.
Am I the only one to see the irony of a country that strives to be healthier and safer, only to die of boredom?“
It was no great surprise to hear Lance Armstrong dissemble, even as he purported to come clean.
“I’m flawed character,” he soft-pedalled to Oprah. No, Lance: Hamlet was a flawed character. You are an out-and-out villain.
Rather more disturbing was the reaction from New Statesman, which described the cyclist’s coming clean on drugs as a revelation that he was “merely human,“ before columnist Nicky Woolf spoke of him “simply admitting to cheating” and threw out this chilling apologia:
“Yes, Armstrong started a charity by selling a narrative of sporting prowess that turned out not to be genuine. But he did genuinely overcome cancer to get there; moreover, Livestrong does and always did good work. What’s honestly better – to tell the truth, and not save other lives, or lie to start a successful charity?”
What is better, Mr Woolf, is to tell the truth and still save other lives, not least because a society that uses charity to legitimise wrongdoing is on a slippery slope indeed. Euthanasia? Hey, it would certainly free up some beds…
No, Lance Armstrong didn’t murder anybody but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t still heinous in his own way. He lied and lied again. He repeatedly hijacked a public platform for his own ends and, by all accounts, wasn’t exactly fussy whom he and his ‘people’ steamrollered whenever accusatory arrows rained down on his bubble.
This goes way beyond the occasional moral stumble envisaged by the term ‘merely human’. This was systemic: cold, callous and ruthless. Organised crime without the bullets.
And when Lance Armstrong is finished taking a long hard look at himself in the mirror, he might care to step aside so that one or two people at the New Statesman can do likewise. They set the bar between frailty and wickedness way too low.
Read some accounts of TV commentator Brent Musburger’s asides during last week’s National Championship game in American college football and it’s easy to get the impression of a sunken-faced old louche fumbling with himself in the commentary booth.
The normally balanced Yahoo Sports had the 73-year old TV broadcast veteran down as “slightly creepy“, after he did the strangest of things for a commentator and provided words to go with the pictures being broadcast (courtesy of his employer ESPN) of a section of the crowd that included Katherine Webb, the strikingly beautiful girlfriend of one of the game’s principal participants.
The Boston Globedenounced Musburger’s subsequent comments about Webb as “offensive ogling” and spoke of a “creepy adolescent dalliance”, before condemning Musburger’s remarks as ”prurient, sexist, and just plain too weird for prime time TV, considering that he is a half-century older than Webb.”
And somebody please mop the fevered brow of Sue Carter, professor of journalism, at Michigan State University, who will clearly need some time to recover from this atrocity:
“It’s a major personal violation, and it’s so retrograde that it’s embarrassing. I think there’s a generational issue, but it’s incumbent on people practicing in these eras to keep up and this is not a norm.”
My word; how bad can this have been? Shoo the kids out of the room and brace yourself, this gets pretty squalid…
You’re just appalled right? But wait, there’s more. Those tireless newshounds at Yahoo! Sports want us to know that Musburger has form in this area. Steel yourself just one more time and behold this piece of unutterable sleaze from a football game in 2005…
All right, so I’m driving the sarcasm bus here but really… While I would normally dismiss this hysteria as par for the course for those Who Simply Must Be Outraged About Something, there is something runs deeper and more ominously here.
Personally, I can spot in a moment the distinction between celebrating beauty and overtly lusting after it. Had Musburger observed that he “could use a piece of that” or that “there was a gal who could make an old man happy”, all our toes would have curled. But he doesn’t; in fact he simply points out the presence of an attractive young women in a way that was laddish without being crude and then projects the consequences onto the appropriate age-group – the wannabe quarterbacks who would pursue their dream with renewed vigour or the next generation of undergraduates who might just have had their minds made up as to which college they attend.
And that Musburger gets hammered while a TV company – one of many that make crowd close-ups of the beautiful and famous a staple part of their coverage – gets a free pass, represents a common yet lame journalistic distortion: the individual is targeted because it makes for better impact.
Viewers of 20 or 30 years ago would wonder what all the fuss is about but then Musburger’s plight could simply be the inevitable fall-out of an age that has made sex something tawdry and sordid. From hook-up culture, through websites that broker affairs or one-night stands as commodities and on to comedians whose act would collapse were they made to keep it above the waist, the dirty smirk and nudge-nudge mindset predominates, dragging down to its level anyone who wanders into its crosshairs.
So a 73-year-old man pointing out an attractive young woman cannot just be taken at face value but is instead seen as some old pervert who’s throwing his hat into the ring and making a play. Extrapolate this idea and presumably everyone over 50 who might once have complimented good looks must now keep his thoughts to himself. Sexism bad but ageism just dandy. You know how grim a culture has become when even its attempts at moralising sound perverse.
Oh there are some creepy people come out of this tale all right but I don’t have Brent Musburger anywhere on my shortlist. I’m thinking of his hypocritical employers who saw fit to embarrass him with public censure. I’m thinking of journalists and sportstalk jocks so twisted they insist on finding darkness where none exists.
Those are the people in whose company I suspect I could only be for so long before I felt the need to take a shower.
‘Leveson warns journalistic standards could slip if bloggers not subject to law
[Lord Leveson] described bloggers and tweeters as an “electronic version of pub gossip” and said they acted differently to established journalists who have “a powerful reputation for accuracy”‘
Do you suppose this decrepit, urine-sodden, can’t-get-it-up-to-save-himself, mentally fuddled old codger has any idea of the hurt caused by stereotypical generalisations?
Liberal though I used to be where homosexuality was concerned, I’m no longer sure the Bible gives me that option.
That doesn’t sit easily with my natural inclination to live and let live, so the gay marriage issue gives me cause more for reflection than spouting fire and brimstone. I tend to save the polemic for when ‘tolerance’ turns out to be a one-way street and attempts are made with varying degrees of subtlety to shut down one side of the debate.
I am no less irked, however, when Christians reveal a petty side to their case that does their argument no favours. Consider, for example, this Christian Voice article on a Hong Kong millionaire who has offered a bounty of some £40m to the man who can win the heart of his lesbian daughter.
What caught my eye was the caption beneath an accompanying photo of his daughter and her gay partner, taken at their recent civil partnership ceremony:
“Gigi Chao Sze-tsung (right) and her civil partner Sean Eav (left) – we honestly thought at first that the one on the left was her father!”
Question – had the picture shown a man and woman on their wedding day and either he looked effeminate or she looked rather manly, do you suppose Christian Voice would have drawn attention to the fact? I suspect not, on the grounds that Voice staff would have considered making a personal, gratuitous comment, uncalled for by the nature of the story, to have been at best unprofessional and at worst unkind and unChristian.
There is an unavoidable inference here that because the Voice doesn’t recognise the couple’s formal relationship, it doesn’t have to unduly concern itself with their feelings. This is an abysmal own goal. Sadly, it’s not the first from my team.
Last year, Michael L Brown published his book,A Queer Thing Happened to America: And What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been. While intended as rebuttal of the homosexual agenda, publisher and reviewers alike stressed the compassionate approach Brown had to his subject. Certainly, this came out in a discussion of his book between Brown and religious commentator, Dr Frank Turek, which prompted me to head to Amazon, where I beheld the book’s cover photo and heard the distant sound of breaking glass as all of Brown’s rhetoric imploded in my head.
I seem to recall him maintaining at the time that he knows several gay people who find this funny. Well, here’s one straight guy who doesn’t. I find it utterly self-defeating, projecting a message that we’re all serious and compassionate about homosexuality in the arena of public debate but away from camera, when the mics are off, it’s all just a bit of a giggle, these funny people with their limp wrists, fluffy slippers and butch dungarees. How could they possibly imagine they would get to Heaven looking like that?
This debate is difficult enough without ham-fistedness like this.
“Hi gang. Will be slightly late in this morning due to some high-octane shagging. See you later!!!!”
Sure, it probably hints at some deep insecurity but think of this when you’re looking at some of the dry and soulless internal communications that hit your desk today and I believe you’ll understand why I love my job.
Worried about getting old in the workplace? Become a journalist.
While yesterday’s men in many sectors of the economy must make do with taking more of a back seat in the face of changing technology and wave upon wave of young turks, it looks like the boot may be on the other foot where the print media is concerned.
Journalists born before 1975, see, generally know how to spell. Just look through any written-word media these days and you’ll soon pick up on how much of a dying art that has become.
But there’s another thing that should make veteran hacks more, not less valuable as time goes on. Many ‘old school’ guys also know the meaning of “fit to print”, namely that there’s tittle-tattle and then there’s stuff actually worth writing about.
Now there’s a blurred line for you in 2012. Reading Donald Clarke‘s sarcastic lament as Rick Santorum abandoned his run for the White House, I had to keep checking the masthead to make sure that it really was the Irish Times that was running this piece and had decided that the following amounted to worthy op-ed in a quality newspaper:
“Hats are doffed to the gay activists who managed to make [Santorum's] surname a neologism for the damp residue that remains after a particular sexual practice has taken place. (Look it up yourself. I can’t be bothered to reply sarcastically to the complaints a fuller definition would trigger.)”
If you missed the gem of wit that gave rise to this tribute, I’m genuinely sorry to have to enlighten you. Particularly if you’re eating. It is important to spell it out, though, just so you are aware of the level of inspired discourse that floats Clarke’s boat.
Someone aparently decided that taking apart Santorum’s politics with reasoned debate and counter-argument was too tame – what was really needed was for his surname to become a widely-used synonym for the mixture of lubricant and faecal matter that remains following anal sex.
Yep, you heard me right.
There was a time, of course, when puerility as debased as this was confined to the playground, to be mercifully lost in the breeze after a few guffaws among half-wits. Nowadays, alas, the playground is known as the Internet. This stuff gets written down and enjoys a longevity vastly disproportionate to its merit, among people who park their minds in the gutter.
To see this pathetic titbit given fresh life in a paper of the Irish Times status (“hats are doffed”!? Is the man out of his mind?) begs two questions. This Donald Clarke is over the age of 15, I take it? And who among his superiors actually cast an eye over this revolting paragraph and thought, “fit to print”?
While the abiding impact of his memoirs The Point of Departure is to remind us that British politics lost one of its better representatives when Robin Cook died, the book serves two important purposes.
Firstly, his comprehensive dismantling of the supposed case for putting troops in Iraq in 2003 lands a far greater blow on the credibility of Tony Blair than I fear any tribunal will ever muster.
Far from having an axe to grind, Cook, who died in 2005 after spells as Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House, is unabashed in his admiration of what Blair and the Labour Party achieved between 1997 and 2003. When even your staunchest allies feel obliged to resign from cabinet and then be so publicly critical of your thinking as this, you must have put in some pretty lousy days at the office.
While his stand on the Iraq debacle is the central theme of the book, however, the Scot scores some equally valid points when he turns to media matters.
This is no mere tit-for-tatting under the euphemistic guise of ‘setting the record straight’. Having first-hand experience of seeing the press at work, I am forced to concede that he has the Fourth Estate weighed up to a T when describing the harm he believed it does to politics in Britain.
I reproduce extracts below. They should be mandatory reading for anyone who plans on entering this particular bearpit with a pen and notebook.
“…the adversarial mode which is now all the range among broadcasters is part of the reason for the growing alienation of the public from political debate.
“…reducing every political interview to a one-dimensional confrontation suppresses any chance of an honest and balanced discussion of the real dilemma.
“Between [politicians and the media] we have created a style of political discourse which is aggressive and overpersonalised and which has become a barrier between us and our joint public.
“[Politicians] are in danger of seriously boring our voters…leaders today bang away at the same phrase that they are told works well on focus groups…nobody in the party must say anything original…This is deeply baffling behaviour to our electors, who live in a defiantly individualist society…
“The reason why politicians stick to their hymn sheet is that they are dealing with a media which is no longer capable of handling an original idea but knows how to report a personality conflict.
“The irony is that the press constantly complain that politicians are boring but they are not going to dare to be interesting unless the media starts to reward rather than punish originality.
“[Voters] want more MPs with whom they can feel some psychological empathy – MPs who have thrown away their pagers, speak what they think and demonstrate real passion for a cause…most of my colleagues would be happy to rise to that challenge if they felt it was safe to come out of the bunker.
“Today’s headline writers want drama and drama requires conflict and exposure, not progress and solutions…The awkward truth is that serious politics does not throw up a novelty every day for the next morning’s edition. As a result the search for novelty often ends in treasuring trivia.
“Politicians find themselves conscripted to parts in a soap opera, in which the plot line is solely about who is on the way up, who is on the way down and who is on the way out…The elector is reduced to being a spectator rather than the owner of the process.”
Good to see the Morning Star pushing forward the boundaries of quality journalism yesterday.
Their front page banner headline, on view for all to see at newsstands around the country – CITY KNOWS IT’S TAKING THE PISS.
That’s it, is it? The sum total of the Star brains trust’s command of the English language?
And there I was thinking that what separates professional writers from the man in the street is that they take the trouble to convey anger in intelligent prose while Joe Public merely reaches for the first expletive to come to mind.
I know the Internet is supposed to have made everyone a journalist but I had no idea just how much the divide has narrowed.
And how counter-productive for a newspaper with the Morning Star‘s politics. I’m trying to think of a more emphatic way in which its editorial staff could have made themselves look like peasants. But I’m struggling.
Not a great day at the office for The Guardian‘s Paul Hayward, who believes the cross-city move of Birmingham City manager Alex McLeish to hated rivals Aston Villa should have met with little more than raised eyebrows from either side of the Second City.
And in a passionless, clinical corporate environment, much of what he says would make sense. But this is football and sportswriters like Hayward, who would be the first to bleat about the game losing its passion if they thought it would fill a column, should realise that tribalism, lazy or otherwise, is the inevitable flipside of such passion. It fills stadia, sells merchandise and guarantees football writers work.
Alex McLeish moving from Birmingham City to Aston Villa is indeed neither illegal nor immoral. Alex McLeish leaving Birmingham City because he feared he might be on one of those unspoken win-your-first-five-games-or-you’re-out deals at St Andrews next season, is understandable.
Alex McLeish presiding over the relegation of Birmingham City and then moving to Aston Villa, however, is tactless and insensitive and demonstrates that the insular cluelessness of many footballers does not end when they hang up their boots.
This is a man who managed a club in Glasgow, for goodness’ sake. Did he learn nothing?
Has he even considered how much weight his words will carry next time he’s exhorting his charges in a relegation battle to show some commitment to the cause?
And has he made sure he’s being paid enough by his new club to make worthwhile the risk of becoming one of the game’s great trivia questions: who was the last manager to take two clubs in the same city down in consecutive seasons?
It sounds to me like money has spoken and status has trumped all other considerations. If Paul Hayward seriously thinks that this should be met with a mere sigh by football followers then I would suggest that when next season comes around, he covers the occasional game from the stands, instead of the press room. He is beginning to lose touch with both his subject and his audience.
. While intended as rebuttal of the homosexual agenda, publisher and reviewers alike stressed the compassionate approach Brown had to his subject. Certainly, this came out in 
is to remind us that British politics lost one of its better representatives when 
