Those Yellow Bastards

I’ve started to entertain the notion that the ‘The Masses’ aren’t anything like as prodigiously stupid as the discursive forces of our time would have us believe. The probability of stumbling across a newspaper column with substance, be it online or on those soggy rag-pages themselves, seems to be an increasingly unlikely occurrence. It’s no surprise that papers are just as saturated with mindless, grotesquely ignorant and egotistic trash as they have ever been, but the sheer vacuity of reporting in general (and to claim that certain papers must be more than vacuous would be a dangerous statement indeed) seems to have seeped, like a viscous poison, into the once feather-light world of Opinion columns. So-called Free opinions. Deft prose. Provocative ideas, or notions or theories. Anything to resonate with that strange and nebulous human mass, The Readers.

Hell, maybe The Readers are simply getting more and stupid with every terrorist attack, famine, flood or other temporary infraction of moral order which passes them by. But a more likely cause for the sudden downturn of quality amidst the pages of Opinions columns seems to be located far closer to the throbbing wound in the newspaper industry itself: the manic, Ritalin-crazed keyboard fiends themselves gnashing their teeth wildly as they concoct potions of widespread fear and ignorance. The columnists themselves. Those Yellow Bastards. Who would have ever suspected that that self-same, self-inflicted lobotomy (the gesture of reading the news features of a politically aligned tabloid) could slither, invisible, onto this hallowed ground of free speech? Maybe I’m getting a little twisted here, trying to knot two strands of argument together in the same post. Time for another beer.

(Lobotomy with Icepick, circa 1950)

Where was I? Ah yes. Bitching about stream-of-consciousness writing – the sheer hypocrisy of it, the bare-faced goddamn hypocrisy. But let’s return to those lucky perpetrators who are actually remunerated for such atrocities. Richard Littlejohn. Amanda Platell. Giles Coren. Giles Whittel. The notion that The Readers are able to ingest this kind of material, day in and day out, without contracting some kind of strange and terrible affliction is an absolute mystery to me. The Crimes against Coherence (even if the phrase shouldn’t be capitalized, it deserves such a merit) which are committed by these word smiths are broad in their numbers. The first is an almost complete inability to construct a logical argument, of which a perfect example is this column, where a dyed-in-the-wool Tory waxes lyrical about a nonexistent Golden Age of fun, and guilt-trips The Readers simultaneously by promising that he, the archetype of good parenting, would never alow his children to be mentally sodomized by video games.

Further down the spiral, there is the thinly concealed plethora of ‘isms’ and phobias in the columns of the Daily Mail. (Ironic imagery of sores in LJ's column) That poor gaggle of victims, The Readers, is protected from absolute trauma only by sparse advertisements, which act as garish interludes between the deviant symphonies of a dissonant orchestra of Fear. And there are the laughable ad hominem arguments, seducing The Readers into adopting the political alignment of the paper – simply because the Millaband brothers do have bog-brush hair, or simply because David Cameron does present himself as something of a class-conscious rah. (Wait a second – if we’re going to start verbally assaulting such types, let’s start at the rotten core itself, and peel our way outwards. But that’s for another time...)

Yet the worst element of such columnists is not necessarily what they write, but the perverse turn of fate which allowed them to inhabit this privileged yet ultimately hollow position in the first place. The veil of meritocracy which conceals the hideous truth of our lives, a brutally nepotistic nightmare, is rarely as frail as that which shrouds the Journalism industry. There is no such thing as a simply perceptive columnist – although there are possibly exceptions, such as Caitlin Moran - simply because it is impossible to become a columnist without having enjoyed the sweet nihilism of celebrity. There are no everyman reporters or skilled, rebellious or visionary journalist working the columns because, according to the columns themselves, people don’t want to read about the subjective experiences of a ‘nobody’. People seem to have forgotten the fact that presidents and paupers alike will all feed the worms at some point in the next hundred years and rot away into complete nothingness, with nothing but a faint scratch of memory on the wall – so who the fuck is supposed to be a somebody in our society?

It all seems to spiral downwards towards – of course – an unwanted and unlikely cultural phenomenon. Something not dissimilar to ‘That Yellow Bastard.’ I’m not alluding to the racist term for an Oriental gentleman here, but that rather odious character from Frank Millers acclaimed comic strip (and blockbuster Hollywood movie of course) Sin City. Check him out. That Yellow Bastard wouldn’t have got to where he was without the help of some well-placed contacts in the family. Potential is irrelevant. And just as That Yellow Bastard is able to abuse his unsuspecting victims due to a position of power which he does not merit, Those Yellow Bastards in the papers are violating our brains with party-ties, fear-mongering and ignorance –all under the guise of a candle-wick celebrity with sequins for eyes.