I don’t mind hypocrisy as long as courtesy comes with it
Posted in General on 05. Aug, 2010
(“I don’t mind hypocrisy as long as courtesy comes with it.”) But despite his claim to being taken with Atlanta’s “hypomanic” business culture and incessant chatter about being world-class, what he seems to like best about the South is what used to be there, like the view from his Richmond window or the seemingly genetic grace and courage of his mostly Southern flyboys in The Right Stuff. He may rhapsodize about his mother’s iced tea with mint or the “genteel Richmond accent”. [TOM] WOLFE clearly sees the South more as something that shaped him than as something he is unduly taken with today. And when it is all over back we troop to our bothies for dinner, just like the grandees in their Barbour jackets and cavalry twill, and raise a glass to the fine sport we have enjoyed.
It was hard work; it was invigorating; and it took our minds off our own troubles for a moment.. But the most striking effect is that this public shooting gallery is, like shooting, anything but fair There is a cycle involved, and it is a vicious one. To qualify as fair game we must first attain celebrity; but celebrity is something conferred only by media attention. It is we who feed and fatten our calves for ritual slaughter, we who gasp in astonishment when they fall with a thump into the mud. On the very day of its ultra-liberal declaration it featured, as if to prove the point, a rather ham-fisted headline highlighting the claims of a beleagured fireman: “I’d rather be gay than black”. Was this an improvement? The next morning Richard Littlejohn felt sufficiently unbound by the new local rules to make a few lame jokes about “cottagers” and “irons”.None of that is surprising.
If it wasn’t anti, then by definition it had to be pro – impossible to conceive of there being a middle way, in which some stories have merit and some do not.Certainly, it put some of the Sun’s own writers into a tailspin. It is even a rather sophisticated response to a modern truth, which is that there is no such thing as “the story” – only rival accounts of it. In taking first one side, then the other, the newspaper was merely acting as a mouthpiece for competing factions, without intervening (except to exaggerate). It is a one-dimensional procedure, and anything but a fair game.