FS: one "pre-owned" column
Has Nick no shame? His Evening Standard column (helpfully reproduced at Islamophobia Watch) is merely a pathetic recycling of his Observer latest. Archbish, Tipton three or four, etc. Pretty much everything has therefore already been said by the rest of the gang. I was slightly taken with this para though:
There is a strange mood among the metropolitan intelligentsia at the moment. It has become a kind of class betrayal to do anything other than blame Blair and Bush for the woes of the world. On Sunday we had a spectacle more obscene than anything Rowan Pelling has published. The Archbishop of Canterbury stood in the Sudan, a country filled with the mass graves the Islamists have dug, and failed to register a squeak of protest. While crimes against humanity stared him in the face he chose to burble to David Frost about Guantanamo, inevitably, and – may his god forgive him – gay vicars.
Now does this mean that Nick believes that the Archbish is a member of the "metropolitan intelligensia"? That may not be the logical implication, but it is certainly the conversational one. I look forward to the future Nick column is which Rowan Williams is exposed as a hypocritical cocaine snorter and Gilbert and George fan. Never mind the Sudan, is it really fitting that the Archbishop spends his time hanging out at those fashionable Islington parties to which Nick isn't invited?
There is a strange mood among the metropolitan intelligentsia at the moment. It has become a kind of class betrayal to do anything other than blame Blair and Bush for the woes of the world. On Sunday we had a spectacle more obscene than anything Rowan Pelling has published. The Archbishop of Canterbury stood in the Sudan, a country filled with the mass graves the Islamists have dug, and failed to register a squeak of protest. While crimes against humanity stared him in the face he chose to burble to David Frost about Guantanamo, inevitably, and – may his god forgive him – gay vicars.
Now does this mean that Nick believes that the Archbish is a member of the "metropolitan intelligensia"? That may not be the logical implication, but it is certainly the conversational one. I look forward to the future Nick column is which Rowan Williams is exposed as a hypocritical cocaine snorter and Gilbert and George fan. Never mind the Sudan, is it really fitting that the Archbishop spends his time hanging out at those fashionable Islington parties to which Nick isn't invited?
posted by Captain Cabernet at 3/09/2006 11:15:00 AM
7 Comments:
Wasn't Clare Short's meeting to ascertain whether they should be banned?
"The Archbishop of Canterbury stood in the Sudan"
So it's become *The* Sudan again? Is this just NC, or is there a wider trend to bring back the Definite Article on former western colonies? My favourite was always The Argentine.
Note as well that the one novel point in the Standard column is that you are now officially "with us or against us"; because Rowan Pelling is against the incarceration without trial at Guantanamo, she is therefore in favour of suicide bombers.
The two joke bits were also pretty bad btw.
also, the reference to "graves the Islamists have dug" in Sudan is off point. The current government of Sudan fell out with the Islamists in the late 1990s and the leader of the Islamist opposition party has spent most of the last five years in jail. The Janjaweed in darfur aren't Islamists either. Nick has, I think, picked up on a few references to the role of Islamism in Sudan in the Berman book and not noticed that they refer to things which happened ten years ago. Either that or he is now literally unable to conceive of anything bad happening in the world without TEH ISLAMITSS being at the root of it.
Could AW maybe offer a prize for a sighting of a member of this "metropolitan intelligensia"? I think I maybe saw a grainy photograph of one in Fortean Times.
Does such a body exist? Do they have policy meetings and a party line? Are they perhaps affiliated to the Illuminati? How does one measure their "mood", strange or otherwise.
Yours, feeling left out...
Do we have a seal of dacre here?
The proposition Nick starts from and wishes us to proceed with is thre classic melanieism: those who oppose me are thereby clinically mentally ill.
There is a strange mood among the metropolitan intelligentsia at the moment. It has become a kind of class betrayal to do anything other than blame Blair and Bush for the woes of the world.
Thing is, this isn't a 'strange mood' at all. "Being ruder about Western leaders than the average man on the street" is pretty much the standard setting for the Bruschettistas, and has been since time immemorial. Indeed, I remember an Observer columnist by the name of Nick Cohen being blisteringly hostile to Mr Blair on a weekly basis not so long ago.
There is certainly a 'strange mood' in Nick Cohen at the moment, however, which mood is approaching its fourth anniversary.
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