Dickheads

How to write a triumphant column about Trump that will make you look a dickhead in four years or less

Are you a journalist? Right-of-centre? Looking to write a gloating column about President Trump that will age very, very badly? Follow these tips:

Skip over the inconvenient
Whether it’s the attempt to overturn an election or his bromance with Putin, move smoothly past the awkward fact that he proudly stands for multiple policies you’re theoretically dead against. Stress instead his mandate, his restoration of traditional values, how lovely his wife looks in her gangster hat, and let cancelling elections come as a lovely surprise.

Dismiss valid concerns
The promise to retake the Panama Canal by force? No more than the aggressive opening of a negotiation by a renowned deal-maker. Trump’s no more going to send troops in an act of war against a peaceful neighbour than he would pack the judiciary with pals and arrest political opponents on false charges. Stay sure of that until it happens.

Praise his restraint
Trump loves praise, so lavish it. Tell him how wonderful he is for not imposing martial law, how statesmanlike for not appointing his sons to key cabinet posts, that by not ordering his face to be added to Mount Rushmore on the first day he is acting in the tradition of Jefferson and Lincoln. Then watch him do all those things because you gave him the idea.

Revel in the defeat of the wokerati
Never mind what Trump will do, what about your enemies? The columnists for rival newspapers who disagree with you? The twats who insist on having different opinions to you on social media? This is a time to mock, to belittle, to taunt them for their ridiculous claims of incipient fascism. You definitely won’t regret those words.

Stake your reputation
Dizzy with success, make predictions. Elon Musk’s random firing of half the government will have uniformly positive consequences. Appointing a vaccine-skeptic will be a massive boost to America’s health. Making it clear the rule of law doesn’t apply to thugs on our side will work out brilliant. Then sit back and wait to reap the wonderfulness you have sown.

The Daily Mash

Of course.

I do love a good rant...

...and this one is just wonderful! - as Richard Metzger of the fabulously bizarre Dangerous Minds [informing its regular readers - of which I am one - of a forthcoming new direction for the site] tells it like it is:

The glory days of the internet are long over. It had a good run, but it’s done.

I’d compare this sorry state of affairs to the history of widespread cocaine use in America, it’s almost the exact same story. (Okay, okay, it’s not even a remotely similar narrative, but don’t harsh my analogy!) At first, it was all fun and games. Pure and undiluted nose candy for the masses. The 1970s must’ve been incredible! But then the Devil’s dandruff starts getting stepped on. Unscrupulous dealers began cutting their Peruvian marching powder with baby laxatives and veterinary dewormers. Ultimately it becomes more of a situation where the dealers were cutting their baby laxative with cocaine and not the other way around. Now it’s all just garbage.

And that what’s happened with Internet content, too. When everyone got online in the mid-90s, it was fun and wild and fascinating. New and novel experiences awaited. Fast forward to today and the World Wide Web is sadly akin to a selfie and meme-filled version of WALL-E’s junkyard planet or an ocean full of plastic bottles and other human-created detritus. A friend of mine once described what we did at Dangerous Minds as “panning for Internet gold” but I told him I thought it was more like spelunking in a dank cave, standing in a river of shit wearing hip-high waders and a gas mask.

Today’s internet is by and large a highly toxic HAZMAT site. Assholes are everywhere you turn. You can’t escape them. But on top of that, all the creativity has vanished. What started as a massive outpouring of cross-cultural communication, international information exchange and just plain HIGH WEIRDNESS has turned into a filtered, Facetuned selfie-infested septic tank of “LOOK AT ME” frivolity, knucklehead narcissism and abject idiocy. The rise of the TikTok “expert” dolling out their supposed wisdom in 45-second increments seems to me an especially pernicious development. These people are seldom experts on anything other than hashtags and yet they all apparently have an audience 10X that of CNN’s.

With the AI apocalypse rapidly encroaching upon us it’s about to get even worse. I knew it when I first saw that Star Wars if it had been directed by Wes Anderson video. “Hmmm, that’s kinda clever” immediately gave way to “Okay I get this and I can’t be bothered to even watch it to the end.” It was a watershed moment for me and when I realised THIS SHIT IS THE FUTURE...

...So we’re going to do something different. Something that’s not been filtered or Facetuned or to be found anywhere in this cultural wasteland full of regurgitated garbage. Something with actual experts who know what they’re talking about and can speak intelligently for longer than a minute. Something that will make you smarter.

Wow!

Read the whole thing at the Dangerous Minds site.

My brain thinks blog-like

I said very similar things in a blog post here way back in 2014...

...but here we are, a decade on, in 2024 - and I must admit I whooped when I read this piece by Simon Reynolds in The Guardian!

I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone...

...one of the great things about blogging, for a professional journalist, is that you can write about topics that aren’t topical. You are unshackled from schedules. An old record or TV programme you’ve stumbled on, or simply remembered, is fair game...

My brain thinks blog-like: the digressive rhythms, the lurching between tones, it’s how my mind moves when it’s not behaving itself in print... blogging should be the opposite of work. But (even) if it’s not compelled, blogging is compulsive: an itch I have to scratch.

Amen, sister!

---

So, in the true spirit of blogging, here an esoteric selection of bits and pieces I read about recently...

Sad news - the young woman who (with her then-boyfriend) was the subject of one of the world's most famously-photographed snogs Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville (Kiss by the Town Hall) [taken by French photographer Robert Doisneau] has died at the ripe old age of 93.

Good news - Slag Lane is to keep its name, after a ten-year battle when a "local resident" lodged a complaint that it was "rude".

Scary news - the roof hatch on one of the pods on the London Eye was blown open during Storm Henk, with people in it!

And finally, some cosy news - the Shipping Forecast is one hundred years old!

One of the most comforting sounds for land-lubbers to listen to as they settle down to sleep, nevertheless its importance to shipping remains of paramount importance. Perhaps not quite so serious, this version still makes me snigger:

BBC Radio 4's Brian Perkins reads Les Barker's version of The Shipping Forecast

Of course, some people reading this [notably the denizens of our former colonies and dominions] will have no idea what on earth that was all about, so instead, here's the programme's soothing theme tune:

Alan Perry/William Gardner Orchestra - Sailing By [Ronald Binge]

Lovely.

Neither lawyers nor governments could restrain him

“No journalist of my generation could escape Harry’s influence... we were all brought up on his text books. Everything we knew about constructing an intro, subbing, cropping a picture, designing a page or writing a headline we knew it because of Harry. It was drummed into us... He was to journalism what Doctor Spock was to child-rearing... the journalist who reminds us all why we all wanted to be journalists. At a time when some people are giving journalism a bad name he is somebody who gave journalism a good name. He represents what we could be and what we should be.” - former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.

"[He] transformed Fleet Street and [he] transformed the lives of all of us by understanding and appreciating that investigative journalism defines us. It earns our troublesome place in society and it makes clear for every journalist that what we do, for all our flaws, is invaluable." - former BBC head of news James Harding.

“He was the inventor of team journalism. In the editorial chair, he was a human dynamo and set in motion such a stream of powerful stories and campaigns that his rivals (I was one) could only struggle to keep up.” - Donald Trelford, former editor of the Observer.

"Evans was not just the champion of using journalism to set wrongs right. He was also a quintessential British editor who, for all his high-minded causes, understood that journalism was foremost not an intellectual pursuit but a craft – one that demanded muscular and clear language, captivating pictures, arresting headlines, perfect layout of the newspaper page... and, above all else, in a phrase coined by his foreign correspondent, a strong dose of 'rat-like cunning'.” - award-winning investigative journalist Stephen Grey, Reuters.

Sir Harold Evans, considered to be "the finest newspaper editor of his generation", the guiding light of every journalist and journalism student (myself included) for his comprehensive series of books on the subject of writing, editing, layout and impact of the journalistic craft, has died, aged 92. The world owes him a huge debt.

Having ruled Fleet Street for decades, he finally quit after Rupert Murdoch took over The Times and began to enforce his own personal and political influence on the editorial content of the paper. He departed for New York with his wife Tina Brown, latterly editor of Vanity Fair, and never looked back.

His remarkable journalistic campaign achievements included the pardon granted to the unfortunate Timothy Evans, hanged for the murders of his wife and child that were actually perpetrated by his neighbour the serial killer Reginald Christie, and the victory over the pharmaceutical company for proper compensation for the families of children born with deformities from the drug Thalidomide. His pioneering hard-hitting investigative journalism produced a string of world class scoops during his fourteen-year tenure at The Sunday Times, including the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland, the unmasking of Kim Philby as a KGB agent working for MI6 and publication of the Crossman Diaries.

As former editor of the FT Lionel Barber, in his obituary, says: "Neither lawyers nor governments could restrain him."

And who could ask for a better epitaph than that?

Harold Evans quotes: 

• "The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth." 
• "The democratisation of news is fine and splendid, but it's not reporting. It's based on a fragment of information picked up from television or the web, and people are sounding off about something that's not necessarily true." 
• "Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches." 
• "In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat."
• “Things are not what they seem on the surface. Dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper.”
• “Just find out what the bloody facts are!”

RIP Sir Harold Matthew Evans (28th June 1928 – 23rd September 2020)

Thought for the day

The great observationalist

“The nanny seemed to be extinct until 1975, when, like the coelacanth, she suddenly and unexpectedly reappeared in the shape of Margaret Thatcher.”

“To be loathed by Tony Benn is something any political writer of my age would sell their grannies for. I feel humbled by his hatred... He says that he was 'a great admirer of Mao...he made mistakes, because everybody does'. True enough. I certainly do. But my mistakes do not make me possibly the greatest mass killer in history. Here are the figures: Number of innocent people who died in the Great Leap Forward, through Mao’s policies for the countryside and from mass executions: between 40 and 65 million. Number of deaths caused by me: 0. But Benn greatly admired Mao.”

"When I was collecting material for a political gossip column, and someone said something interesting, I would wait for them to add, 'and I don't want to read that in your magazine!' In which case I wouldn't use it. But if they didn't remember to say it, I'd nip off to the loo, write the story up, come back and change the subject."

"I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs."

"If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery."

"Every time humanists try to get a slot on 'Thought For the Day' on Radio 4, they are told it's reserved for 'the faith community,' whatever that is. Yet 'TfT' is almost always pabulum about how God wants us all to love each other and care for the unfortunate. I'm sure humanists would say much the same, without God."

RIP Simon Hoggart, broadcaster, journalist and writer extraordinaire.

What does it mean to be gay?

A most fascinating debate has opened on The Guardian website today.

Esteemed gay author Philip Hensher (who was entrancing when he read from his own work King of the Badgers at Polari last October) has posted his review of a new book called How to Be Gay by David M Halperin. Here is an extract:

What does it mean to be gay? Is it enough, as many people think, just to fall into the sex-clinic's category of "men who have sex with men"? That is intended to include the closet case and the cottager who goes home to wife and children. There are plenty of people – increasing numbers, in fact – who are gay without having much to do with traditional gay culture. There are gay people who follow rugby and even play it – not necessarily in a pervy way – and those who genuinely quite like the New Statesman. Some gay men live their entire lives kitted out in beige anoraks. Some of them collect stamps and others work for engineering companies. Some of those men – gay but not Gay, as it were – regard the whole musicals-interior decoration-fashion-thing as a curious foreign language, not really worth learning. They have never said "Bona" or "fabulous" in their lives; the only musical they have ever seen is Phantom of the Opera, because their aunt took them. What their culture is, and whether it forms a unity, the cultural critic cannot, apparently, say. What he can be concerned about, it seems, is the culture of Gay, passed down through generations of slappers, propping up the bars of Soho in London, Chelsea in New York, and the Marais in Paris, all quarters which are now as dead as the proverbial dodo.

David Halperin has written an over-long book, more localised in its application than he seems fully to appreciate, about the aspects of being gay other than sexual choice. His thinking arrives courtesy of a course he teaches at an American university. Naturally, when a course in "How to Be Gay" was announced in the American mid-west, an army of enraged family-first campaigners rose up in taupe leisurewear to denounce Professor Halperin for wanting to recruit the innocent. The passages recounting this provide the most amusing sections of the book, as taupe leisurewear and its mental equivalents so often do. He admits that "American" is an unspoken adjective in much of what he has to say, including the title of the book – I guess "How to be an American Gay" would be an even more uninviting subject than the one he has chosen. Outside America, he reliably gets things wrong, suggesting that Bollywood musicals may represent the same sort of gay cult to Indian gay men that Sex and the City does to Americans – he's clearly never seen a film in a Calcutta cinema, or he would have noticed that the appeal is not a gay thing at all at its source. He's not even very good on opera, bringing up Aida as his prime example – if he knew any opera queens, he'd know that we are much more likely to be going to Tristan, Salome and Janacek. When I last saw The Makropoulos Case, the stalls were like Lo-Profile on a Friday night, packed with queens waving at each other, opera glasses in hand.

In fact, the limits of the book are set not just by the limits of his culture, but by his understanding of what culture might be, even just in America. His interests are not really in gay culture at all, but in gay taste, particularly in film and TV shows. He doesn't show much interest in gay meeting places – when he does record finding himself in a backroom, it is to talk about the porn playing to an accompaniment of 19th-century opera. He doesn't, amazingly, show any interest in clubbing, which I would say was a much more powerful expression of gay culture to recent generations of gay people than terrible old movies. He doesn't write about clothes, or gestures, or gait, or any of what identifies a gay man to another at 80 paces, or the syntax and vocabulary and slang which makes them mutually clear at closer quarters – I mean, you can't always be saying "Have you seen Mommie Dearest?" to strangers. Halperin pretends to be an outsider looking in, but you only need to look at the Earls Court, circa 1985 moustache ornamenting his face to realise that he's writing from well within his own culture, looking out, but not looking very far. Perhaps if you stand still long enough, you become an outsider, as the culture moves swiftly on, from Judy to Gaga.

True to form, this has encouraged a healthy discourse among Guardian readers, which I have really enjoyed reading! Comments such as:

• "I have never believed anyway that what passes for most of gay culture is in any way radical. The pressure to conform to notions of what it means to be gay can be as suffocating (hell we in the past have managed to fetishize conformity to an extent that a whole generation of gay men self-identified as "clones") as the pressure to conform to the conservative white picket fence life."
• "At the most we can have a bit of fun with these stereotypes, by either embracing them or subverting them, but at the very least I think we have to accept that it does no good to outright deny them."
• "[I grew up trying]...to be a normal guy who shows no more stereotypically gay traits than my straight friends - but eventually [found] that this was leading to the exact opposite. I was consciously suppressing parts of the 'real me' to try to prove that the stereotypes were false."
• "I suspect some of the more mannered gay behaviour in the past may have been because gays were isolated and threatened. Things like Polari - which sound really weird today, like something out of a 19th century fable - had their purpose. Today there is no particular reason for gay people to look or sound especially different to the rest of the population - unless they want to. But if they want to, then that's cool too."

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

I doubt I will ever read, let alone recommend in the same way, the book itself.

Planet of the Snails

I couldn't resist posting an extract from the latest incisive article by that magnificent columnist Charlie Brooker in The Guardian:

Apologies for swearing in an opening sentence, but have you seen the shitbastard sky we've been having lately? In case you don't recognise it at first glance, it's that bruise-coloured ceiling of floating misery that has been remorselessly flinging cold water over everyone and everything in the nation for weeks now. There's moss growing on the inside of clouds up there. The British summer has long been a work of bleak fiction but this year it morphed into full-blown dystopian satire.

Oh, there are flashes of blue here and there, but they function much like the speedboat prize at the end of a vintage episode of Bullseye: nothing but a cruel reminder of what you could have won. So the weather turns nice for 25 minutes in the late afternoon. You put your sunglasses on and step outside. But by the time you reach the end of the street, the winds are howling, the heavens are weeping, and it's frosted piss city all round.

On and on it goes. It's got to the point where pulling back the curtains each morning feels like waking up in jail. No, worse: like waking up inside a monochrome Czechoslovakian cartoon about waking up in jail. The outdoor world is illuminated by a weak, grey, diseased form of light that has fatally exhausted itself crawling through the gloomy stratospheric miasma before perishing feebly on your retinas. Everything is a water feature. We're on the Planet of the Snails. Cameron's Britain.

Utter genius.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn

Happy 82nd birthday to the wonderful Gore Vidal, man of letters, ardent critic of the Reagan and Bush administrations of America, and elegant wit.

Born into a socialite family, Gore Vidal was destined to mix in the most erudite of circles, his early relationships included Anais Nin, and he was good friends with the Kennedy family. His ground-breaking homosexual-themed novel The City and the Pillar caused controversy in late 1940s America, and his later Myra Breckenridge (a transgender satire) was later made into a cult film starring Raquel Welch and Mae West.

His TV clash with right-wing writer William Buckley was notorious for its evident hatred between the debaters, and on Buckley's death Vidal said "hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred". Ouch!

Some more examples of this deadly waspish wit:

• A good deed never goes unpunished.
• A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
• Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
• Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
• Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
• As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
• By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
• Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
• Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
• I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
• I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
• It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
• Never have children, only grandchildren.
• Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
• Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
• Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
• Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
• The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
• Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
• We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
• What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
• Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

Happy birthday to the original classy bitch!

Gore Vidal biography

Photos of the year

Reuters has posted its selection of photos of the year, and they are fab!







See the whole selection

So, farewell, then...

Just back from Spain to hear the sad news that the doyen of satirical journalism and one of the classic voices of the BBC Alan Coren has died.

A gem of a man, his astute wit and acerbic writing skills made a success out of the rejuvenated Punch magazine in the 60s and 70s, when it (almost) rivalled Private Eye in capturing the gossip on the politics of the day.

One of Britain's most prolific humorists, he was a much-loved panellist on Radio 4's The News Quiz, a fore-runner to Have I Got News For You, and latterly was a regular on the sadly now demised Call My Bluff. Alan's long journalistic career saw him as star columnist in The Times, Observer, Tatler, The Listener, Mail on Sunday and Sunday Express, among others, and his brilliant self-deprecating humour earned him the nickname "The Sage of Cricklewood", an epithet he would take great pride in all his life.

A nation has lost yet another great writer and intellectual, and for that we should all feel very sad.

Alan Coren's obituary in The Times

He lived for gossip

A man after my own heart! Described as "the hack who lived for gossip", Nigel Dempster - unrivalled lord of the society columns and stalwart of Private Eye jibes for decades - is dead.

Dempster's columns in first the Daily Express, then later the Daily Mail, concentrated on revealing the foibles and indiscretions of the gentry, the rich, the famous and not-so-famous alike. As Roy Greenslade says in his tribute in the Guardian, "There was a vicarious pleasure in reading about the illicit relationships, the divorces and the parties."

Although his days were numbered with the onset of rival (and much cheaper and easier to digest) slag-mag columns in the tabloids, the rise of the TV and pop "celebrity" and Hello! and OK! magazines, his spirit still lives on - if only in their envy at his ability (and their failure) to get the true stories before they happen.

Dempster accurately predicted the planned resignation of Harold Wilson as prime minister - an event which came as a bolt from the blue to most of the political establishment. He was also first with the story about Prince Andrew's plans to marry Sarah Ferguson. These are the kinds of scoop the big celebrity magazines would die for...

But after all, only a true journalist can root out the lowest facts about the most "untouchable" people, and present them (as he did) in a matter-of-fact way amongst the photos of polo matches and charity balls, then sit back and wait for the fireworks to begin!

RIP

Roy Greenslade on Nigel Dempster

BBC Online's obituary