Tuesday, December 20, 2011

The Age's Carrion Bird

ANOTHER DAY, another reason to lament the absolute witlessness which now characterises the Phage. Actually, it was earlier in the week when Melbourne’s brain-bereft broadsheet chose to mark the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq with an opinion column by, of all people, George Galloway. It was a predictable rant – death of the American empire, blood-soaked sands, millions dead, nothing gained etc etc. All music to the ears of Age editors, whose ceaseless diminishing of their paper’s franchise speaks of an intellectual breadth stretching only from A to B, as in Asininity to Bolshevism.  The Age picked up Galloway’s thoughts from the Guardian, which is no one’s idea of a balanced or even sane publication.  But at least the Guardian had the decency to publish on the same day an alternate perspective, that of former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton. At the Age, where editors mistake fog for thought and package words only to pleasure the egos of those lost in similar clouds of self-regard, Bolton did not make the cut.

What a surprise, but it was not the only one.

On the same day the Age employed Galloway to deliver its we-told-so gloat – an ill-argued and demonstrably false one, but it is The Age after all – the newspaper also reported the death of Christopher Hitchens, which prompted a series of adulatory eulogies and encomiums.

Cognitive dissonance, anyone? This little blog’s readers will know without being told how much Hitchens detested Galloway, not to mention his contempt for those who found the crooked, bribe-stuffing, Saddam-pleasuring Scotsman a useful mouthpiece for their causes. Hitchens would have appreciated the Age’s ironic juxtaposition – appreciated it as an opportunity to lacerate those who still imagine they are the gatekeepers of acceptable opinion, those unprepared to acknowledge even as their company’s stock rolls further and faster down the slope to bankruptcy that what they publish has something to do with the posse of receivers gathering at the bottom.

Well, when the Age hits the fan, the office equipment is sold at auction and Melbourne is left with only the Herald Sun and its daily diet of puppies, kittens, hemlines and footballers, perhaps some of those freshly unemployed Age editors will take the time to expand their reading.


Allowing that exposure to their own proiduct has not by that stage entirely robbed Age editors of the ability to read, of course.

9 comments:

  1. Never mind the John Bolton article, they should print Hitchens's missive from the Weekly Standard beside Galloway's...

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  2. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.December 20, 2011 at 3:04 PM

    Where there's no actual cognition, it's hard to recognise any dissonance I guess. They just fire off from somewhere in the brainstem rather than the frontal lobes, Prof.

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  3. George Galloway.... half brother to our very own rabid Scot; Doug Cameron!

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  4. "Cruelty to trees" -- hah!

    A pleasure, Mr Bunyip.

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  5. BTW: who's paying GG's bills these days? Does anyone know?

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  6. I have a lot of respect for Bolton, but even he is going soft, relatively, in saying that with hindsight, we should have overthrown Saddam at the beginning or end of Gulf War One.
    We knew that then, just as we knew in 2003 that going into Iraq without dealing harshly with both Syria and Iran was to put it mildly, kicking the can down the road while enduring way too much aggro in the meantime. We are nearing the end of that cul de sac, and the cans await. They contain more than just worms.
    Blogstrop

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  7. Bloody good summary young Bunyip. Actually you could have added, when the ship hits the sand and the legion of editors are looking for sympathy, tell 'em they will find it in the dictionary between shit & syphilis.

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  8. I'm convinced the Garudian published the Bolton article to demonstrate what a self-deluded, vile and extremist loon the fellow actually is. About on the same level as the ghastly shite Galloway, but on the opposite side of the audio track so to speak.

    What sins of perversion has the human race committed to deserve such cretinous filth masequerading as human beings, much less paying them good money to act out their ideological fantasies as politicians?

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  9. G'day Prof. Just wondered what you thought of Hitchens. Seems to be an eloquent, amoral hypocrite to me.

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