Friday, February 29, 2008
On Patriotism
Somebody emailed Channel 4 News last night to accuse Jon Snow of treason. The show had used the Afghan Harry story as an excuse to question the role of the media in keeping quiet about the fact that the Prince was on the front line. As Richard Havers comments on my previous post, these were new depths for C4 News. I'll go along with treason if we can make it stick, but, for the moment, let's just see if we can get them banged up on a charge of aggravated hyprocrisy. Every news organisation indulges in deals and compromises. Usually this is self-interest, sometimes it is to protect others, occasionally it is in the interests of the state. The latter is tricky because the state might be behaving badly. But the media make judgments. The case for keeping quiet about Harry was overwhelming so C4 News can, as far as I am concerned, be sent to the Big House. Beneath all this lurks the theme of patriotism. I don't think anybody at C4, nor, indeed, anybody at the BBC would accept patriotism as a justification for doing anything. But, to be honest, the fact that Harry was sent to the front line, the fact that he wanted to go and the fact that we helped protect him made my chest swell just a little. I am a patriot. I don't have wet dreams about Margaret Thatcher, I don't think the British Empire was a damned fine way of civilising Johnny Foreigner, I'm not crazy about Elgar, I find the Royals faintly ridiculous, I don't decorate my home with pictures of horses or hunting scene table mats and I don't stand around in country pubs agreeing with everything in the Daily Mail. But England - not Britain - made me and I'm grateful. This gratitude would, I hope, in 1914 or 1940 have prepared me for death. It certainly prepares me for the odd sacrifice in the national interest. I don't know how widespread this feeling is. I suspect many people of my age or younger regard the word 'patriotism' as so outdated as to be meaningless. I suspect also that our vomit-soaked city centres, our petty bureaucrats, our dodgy government, Ken Livingstone and our 'sleb infested culture convince many more that whatever stirrings they may feel are best disregarded. But, as Tennyson said, 'Tho' much is taken, much abides' and what abides of England - perpendicular architecture, the poetry of Edward Thomas, a certain light, humour, memory - is enough for me, enough, at least, to make me stand up for Harry, England and St George, but not Jon Snow.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Love it. I am going to play some RVW and reread this.
ReplyDeleteSeriously though Bryan I think you've probably said what many others in the country are feeling. Snow's carping was pathetic and it struck me this morning , before reading your post, that perhaps he was miffed that the editor of C4 News hadn't consulted him. He always comes across as so very smug and somehow puts himself above it all.
If he was in Iraq, I would with a whole heart agree with you.
ReplyDeleteI'm never sure whether patriotism is a love of one's country or a love of one's state - yeah, it is a great place to be but I don't want to die for the establishment. I don't think I'm patriotic.
ReplyDeletethe Lt. Wales business is a big mistake. Why did they pander to his wishes, like he was taking up hang gliding or extreme snowboarding? It's quite clear from the clips shown last night that as well as not wishing him to be a target they also didn't want to risk him actually killing anybody - friend or foe! - I mean, imagine how disasterous that would be if it leaked out. (Though interestingly, modern western armies have a job stopping their men from deliberately aiming to miss! Only something like 20% of soldiers are okay about going out and killing their fellow man for the common good. It gives me hope.)
Fire off a few rounds into the sand for the reporters, Wales, then get back to the video surveillance - see, it's just like a computer game. Hell, you needn't even get dressed up for it!
I did admire the way he spoke like a chav - or near enough. Well, at least he gave it a fair try. Obviously he's being air-dropped DVDs of Jamie at Home and Skins. It gives me hope that the end of the monarchy, as we know it, is just around the bend, innit?
sorry, that was way too long!
ReplyDelete...and the winner of the best headline award goes to,
''When Harry Met Tali''
Magnificent stuff, Bryan. You want to be careful with posts like that, though, or you'll have the neighbours angrily chasing you out of the organic deli with rolled up Guardians.
ReplyDeleteDeary me, Ian, that's depressing stuff, however facetious. However much the establishment may have manipulated the situation to keep him as safe as possible, I believe Harry's motives to be pure and pretty goddamn admirable. No doubt I'm hopelessly naive and sentimental, but I'm rather proud of the boy.
I suspect the sheer metropolitan self-importance of some of the media is as good an explanation for its views as anything else. So the media ceases to understand simple things, like bravery, and in fact begins to sneer at them.
ReplyDeletePatriotism, in practice, is standing up for a shared way of life, even if only strawberry jam, kippers and the pub. This isn't bathetic. People will fight for things that are real and there, like the bloke in the next foxhole. Concepts don't hack it when the bombs start falling.
I noticed Harry was carrying a pistol as well as a rifle. I wonder whether he'd been advised to take extra protection on the basis that if things turned really bad he should save the last round for himself to avoid a kidnap.
Harry will be glad of his body armour with Drudge and C4 news lining up to stick a knife in his back... I suspect Guido will say he knew all along by the way...
ReplyDeletei'd go with that. As a half-breed mongrel cur i used to receive a fair bit of racist abuse and loathed England as a nest of chavvery and football. In my old age i see this as one aspect - and one of the worst - of the culture as a whole; and i've come to feel deep attachment to the better England to, as Mark calls it, "a shared way of life". What is culture if not what binds us together and makes sense of life for us? Incomprehensible to an American and, i fear, to many young Englanders nowadays.
ReplyDeletePersonally i find these wars highly suspect but also recognise the boy's bravery in being out there, unless he's so dumb he doesn't realise he's in danger. i must confess i long cherished the hope that the Queen would at some point kick Blair out of a top-storey window and reinstate good old fashioned Monarchy. She could hardly do a worse job than Nu Labour.
I have the foggiest what his motives are but it would be more admirable if he did what the country wanted him to do and stayed away. as for the rest of us, it would be more admirable if we stopped sending naive kids, from whatever backgrounds they belong, into war zones for the sake of old geezers' sense of patriotism.
ReplyDeleteYou are exactly right Mark, sneering is C4 news stock in trade. Snow, of course is the prima donna, but his understrapper, the guy with the Malaysian/Irish sounding monika is creeping up fast.
ReplyDeleteWatching C4 news I sometimes feel that Julius Striecher has risen from the dead and Der Stuermer rides again.
Bryans comments I feel, encapsulate what most reasonable, free thinking English people feel about their country.
Would it be possible, do you think, for that Aussie mag to blab the details of Milly Bands next Afgan visit, prior to him going ?
"it would be more admirable if we stopped sending naive kids, from whatever backgrounds they belong, into war zones"
ReplyDeleteOK, but unless we can recruit whole armies from the rather small stock of non-naive young people, doesn't this amount to saying it would be more admirable if we stopped sending soldiers into war zones?
How do you become a battle-hardened soldier without first having been a naive young kid sent to a warzone?
Luis Enrique
A very insightful post Bryan. Snow is the son of a CoE bishop. What do you expect? But the really sick-inducing moment of last night was the audience in Sterling cheering George Galloway on Question Time.
ReplyDelete''doesn't this amount to saying it would be more admirable if we stopped sending soldiers into war zones?''
ReplyDeletesurely, that goes without saying, Luis. but I don't expect miracles overnight.
I keep hearing things like 40 is the new 30, and 30 is the new 20. So, send those clever buggers and leave the kids out of it.
Having dredged London's nightclubs for traces of Wills and Harry I'm not a big fan of the boy. No doubt he's doing his stint in Afghanistan for all the right reasons, and no one should chastise him for that.
ReplyDeleteBut breaking the media black-out on Harry puts other soldiers in danger, and that's enough for me to hate Drudge. I'm not sure whether that's patriotism or not. I do know that soldiers in Afghanistan are experiencing hell - shit rations, shit kit, and all in 50 degrees. They could do without someone stitching targets to their backs.
Amusingly, he's just said he doesn't like England or the shite our media print. Good on him! i guess what he means is he hates chavs, dullards, Ian McEwan, Leeds, Feminists, Jihaddists, stupid taps, increasingly bad fish & chips, Blair, Nu Labour, that fat Scottish guy, Mars Bars, Big Brother, tv, pollution, inanity, banality and tawdriness and all the heathen ungodliness forced on us by the worst human being ever made by the Devil - Tony Blair.
ReplyDeleteTonight, C4 news is carrying on with its Harry boy story, having given up its salivating Julius Striecher tactics against its own nest (the Britmedia) it now thinks Harry will bring down upon his head the wrath of the Talliwotsit, and by the way the job he had out there was backoffice, what a wimp that lad is.
ReplyDeleteThe head gob, Snow, was somewhat subdued but the balance was redressed by an item asking us to please help two women caught by Peruvian police on the way back to the UK with hard drugs, the poor, badly treated women, how sad, oh dear !
Wankers of the world, unite, C4 news is with you
Malty, brilliant!
ReplyDeleteNot crazy about Elgar, Bryan? For shame!
ReplyDeleteWhat's wrong with Snow and the worst presenters of the BBC is that they are partisans who hide behind the mask of impartiality. They're perfectly entitled to their views and many would get jobs on newspapers if they were prepared to stick their heads above the parapet and argue a position honestly. Instead they take the coward's course. They dress up contestable views as neutral fact and present themselves as neutral ajudicators rather than political animals.
ReplyDeleteIt's only when you are on air with them that you realise how devious they are. You simply can't argue in the normal manner. I was once Andrew Marr's Start the Week. The show had been rigged because BBC liberals felt the argument I was making was an attack on their ideology. (They were right. It was.) But if I had pointed out the trickery of Marr and his producer I would have sounded petty, a bad sportsman.
Listen carefully and you'll notice that they only ask their famous hard questions of people outside the liberal consensus. They know their targets can't complain or point out the double standards because they would look like a tennis player throwing a racket at an umpire or a footballer fouling the referee.
I don't like Fox News but at least it's honest.
How long, one wonders, before it’s revealed that Harry was never actually there? I smell a ‘Capricorn One’ conspiracy.
ReplyDeleteFox News is honest? If honesty is meant here in the sense of being completely dishonest fascist propaganda, then yes, it's honest. Which does however leave us with a deep linguistic problem, where what is meant by a word is the opposite of itself. "I don't like black but at least it's white." I'm not sure it'll catch on.
ReplyDeleteNo Andrew I mean honest in that it doesn't pretend to being anything other than biased.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I imagined, Nick, but it leaves us with the identical problem. "He's a liar, but at least he's honest about it." It doesn't make any real sense.
ReplyDeleteAnd while it might be obvious to you and me, and anyone with a mind of any real activity that Fox are biased, the intent is to mislead vast swathes of people that they are in fact honest. Which of course they're not.
There's an amusing misanthropic line I came across somewhere recently: "Think of the intelligence of the average person, and half the people are even more stupid than that." They're Fox's target audience and their intent to keep them firmly embedded within that sphere of intelligence, or lack of.
Fair enough. But whenever I talk to people at the BBC and C4 about this they won't admit there's a problem, which is a pity because all they need to do is face up to it and face down a minority of journalists who frankly are in the wrong job, and they would be fine.
ReplyDeleteFrom what little i've seen of Fox and the much i once saw of Channel 4 and BBC news, ours has an overwhelming 'reasonableness' to it, which is hard to fight.
ReplyDeleteFox is like a deranged fat American woman screaming "the Russians are coming!" and trying to grab your crotch for a quick 5 minute shuffle over the back of a skip. A man like Bryan would simply pistol whip her to the ground and continue on his way. The reasonable approach, however, is that of the well-dressed gent who asks you for directions in his Yale voice and sodomizes you in the process, leaving you inexplicably sore and sullied.
The best way to establish your sense of reality as not merely your opinion (which is all we can ever have, though an opinion can also be true) but as the rational and natural way of things, is to adopt this tone of reasonableness. By default, if you can take this high ground, any dissenters come across as raving lunatics, conspiracy theorists or Hitler-types or whatever is convenient as a label.
i have a favourite Michael Parenti quote "They say I'm radical. No. Reality is radical."
It is often the case that merely expressing what is the case will sound a bit off the wall and mad, because people with a different opinion have seized the reasonable high ground and can from there look down at you and shake their heads sadly.
Nick,
ReplyDeleteI see from your CV that you are a journalist and, if you forgive the expression , an insider. I therefore acknowledge your, compared with mine, vastly greater knowledge of the workings of the news media (it is that subject under the microscope here)
As you would, I hope, acknowledge my insider knowledge of say, the Concordes fuel distribution system.
You will please bear with me here as I am very new to this form of communication (blogging) and therefore prone to errors.
There appears to be, as you would expect, a big difference in presentational style, between your world and mine, media vs manufacturing.
You only have to read my outpourings to see that.
We both bring to the internet table our own baggage and this we have little control over, we are, as they say, what we are.
We must, however, have the same end results in mind, that is a fairer, more open society than we do at the moment.
There must be, has to be, a turning point in the (hopefully) near future.
The problem is, how the fuck do we achieve this, it would appear to be an impossible task.
This thread (C4 News and its abuse of the British people) is just one, albeit important, of the many problems that beset us.
Lump them all together as the Political, Legal, Financial Establishment that has its snout in our trough, "pissing in our soup and we are drinking it" as Corale Brown so eloquently said, and we (99.9% of the people) have a problem.
We do not want a perfect society, far from it. What we want is some equality for our children. My own daughter is a struggling actress, one of the main reasons she is struggling is nepotism within the industry of her choice.
Our present lords and masters, starting with that grinning lying idiot Blair, and up to the present moronic, financial disaster, Brown, have eroded whatever democracy we had in 1997.
In theory, the media should be our bulwark against the excesses of the establishment, its seems to me, that as an observer at the pixel / print face as it were, that large chunks of it are in bed with the said establishment
We all have our say on this website, and that is one giant step for us, or is it ?
John Jobling
The circus involving Harry was deliberately manipulated by the establishment to shore up more support in Britain for their immoral evil occupation/war in Afganistan, and to create further distrust between the British and the "muslims", and to some degree it will have worked.
ReplyDeleteI agree entirely with your underlying patriotic sentiments Bryan, but in a quite different way. I don't watch or listen to any of the broadcast media so I haven't got caught up in this story in the same way that almost everyone else does. Also I don't want to introduce a jarring note but I am not so wild about our foreign adventures so having our Royal Family trampling all over other people's countries fills me with some mixed sentiments.
ReplyDeleteHowever Harry clearly wanted to be deployed with his unit and I can hardly blame him for that. The only way that he could do that was if the press stayed strum and the only way that was going to happen was if something could be offered in return. As it happen Harry had something very valuable for the press as we can see: access to HRH. So he cut a deal; the press is happy; Harry is happy; everyone is a winner, and I would begrudge anyone any of it.
To me it highlights another English quality, a kind of messy pragmatism . People that whine on about undermining public confidence in the media are missing the point entirely. This is how power works. Get used to it.
I agree entirely with your underlying patriotic sentiments Bryan, but in a quite different way. I don't watch or listen to any of the broadcast media so I haven't got caught up in this story in the same way that almost everyone else does. Also I don't want to introduce a jarring note but I am not so wild about our foreign adventures so having our Royal Family trampling all over other people's countries fills me with some mixed sentiments.
ReplyDeleteHowever Harry clearly wanted to be deployed with his unit and I can hardly blame him for that. The only way that he could do that was if the press stayed strum and the only way that was going to happen was if something could be offered in return. As it happen Harry had something very valuable for the press as we can see: access to HRH. So he cut a deal; the press is happy; Harry is happy; everyone is a winner, and I would begrudge anyone any of it.
To me it highlights another English quality, a kind of messy pragmatism . People that whine on about undermining public confidence in the media are missing the point entirely. This is how power works. Get used to it.
I agree entirely with your underlying patriotic sentiments Bryan, but in a quite different way. I don't watch or listen to any of the broadcast media so I haven't got caught up in this story in the same way that almost everyone else does. Also I don't want to introduce a jarring note but I am not so wild about our foreign adventures so having our Royal Family trampling all over other people's countries fills me with some mixed sentiments.
ReplyDeleteHowever Harry clearly wanted to be deployed with his unit and I can hardly blame him for that. The only way that he could do that was if the press stayed strum and the only way that was going to happen was if something could be offered in return. As it happen Harry had something very valuable for the press as we can see: access to HRH. So he cut a deal; the press is happy; Harry is happy; everyone is a winner, and I would begrudge anyone any of it.
To me it highlights another English quality, a kind of messy pragmatism . People that whine on about undermining public confidence in the media are missing the point entirely. This is how power works. Get used to it.
thi is very unfortunate for Harry, he wanted to shoot some Afganistan people, but with those camera crews following him, he could have been caught for murder, so he was sent home, the remaining armed british and americans in Afganistan and Iraq will be able to continue their role of evil suppression and murder against the people of those countries with a little less attention, now that Harry was sent home after the publicity stunt which they engineered. Its very sad really, Harry only wanted to carry his gun with his unit, and that it is no longer permitted for the aristocracy to wave guns at civilians in Britian, he has been deprived of doing it to civilians across the world!!!!!
ReplyDeleteOf course the real headlines should be "how fucking dare those armed-to-the-teeth assholes occupy Afganistan and Iraq, send them ALL back home"
Shouldn't Harry and the army really be deployed into our chav ghettoes, where a man with a Diemaco or Enfield could really do some good work, taking care of the true enemy - chavs?
ReplyDelete