George Conger argues the Guardian’s recent forays into reporting on Irish Catholicism is “an example of agitprop, which fails the basic tests of sound journalism.”
Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859) Book 3, Chapter 15.
(COMMENTARY) The tom-toms announcing the death of Chief Wahoo, the logo of the Cleveland Indians, may not immediately bring to mind the carts carrying aristocrats to their deaths in Revolutionary France, but for Dickens the creek of the tumbrils’ wheels hurrying to the guillotine sounded, as do the drums from Cleveland, the death of an old way of life. The mob must be satisfied with their choice of victim. Be it a King or a smiling Indian warrior. Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God.
In principle I have no objection to the smashing of idols in a good ideological rant. But it is somewhat trying to see these rants presented as journalism. The newspaper of Britain’s chattering classes, the Guardian, never ceases taking a hammer to the Catholic Church. As an Anglican I don’t mind a good kick in the Vatican’s shins from time to time, but when fairness, balance and context are replaced by conventional wisdom and bigotry, even a good Protestant like me can feel aggrieved.
The story from the paper’s Ireland correspondent reports the Dáil, the Irish parliament will relax the nation’s blue laws, permitting the sale of alcohol on Good Friday this year. The lede of the article entitled “Ireland lifts Good Friday ban on pubs selling alcohol” states:
Read it all at the Media Project