The Guardian (UK) outdoes itself in liberal-academic silliness

And the Telegraph rises, in its characteristic fashion, to the occasion:

Well, that didn’t take long – just four months to turn the summer rioters from the scum of the earth into victims. There we all were during those tense few days in August, glued to our TV screens as shops were looted and homes burned to the ground, misguidedly thinking that the police had lost control of the streets to a rag-tag army of opportunistic, feral criminals.

In reality, what we were witnessing was a protest by politically sophisticated, disenchanted and alienated young people driven to despair by police brutality. This, at any rate, is what we are invited to believe by a study commissioned by The Guardian, in collaboration with the London School of Economics, and published across eight pages of the newspaper yesterday under the heading “Reading the Riots”. Needless to say, the BBC ran with the story all day.

As, equally predictably, did the Huffington Post and the hapless Archbishop of Canterbury.


Read the full Telegraph story here.   For the Guardian/LSE report, go here.


As for me, I am reminded of Theodore Dalrymple's scathing comparison of the aesthetic quality of Italian life with "its utter destruction in Britain, whose streets have been coarsened to a degree unequaled in Europe," with "profound social and economic consequences" (Our Culture, What's Left of It, p.199).  Or Roger Scruton's account of the wanton destruction of England's urban centers by the arrogant and authoritarian mandarins of modern architecture.  Accounts at least as persuasively applicable as the Guardian's tired and predictable 'analysis.'


It is hard to say what is more morally bankrupt and symptomatic of a society that has lost its moorings in a sea of moral and cultural relativism--the criminal behavior, the looting, burning, and destruction of homes, or the hopelessly reductionistic social science analysis, from which moral categories and understandings have been stripped in order to excuse and explain the inexcusable.


A more helpful analysis of the riots recently appeared in the book Out of the Ashes by David Lammy, Labour MP for the area of London where the riots broke out.  No Colonel Blimp or even conservative, Lammy is willing to recognize the importance of family structure.  In short, fatherlessness matters.

When the workers of the world unite

The second collection of readers' letters sent to but unpublished by the Daily Telegraph (UK) has just been published under the title, I Could Go On by Iain Hollingshead (Aurum Press, UK). The paper receives 700 letters a day and publishes 20, so there are gems to be found among the rejects.

Some are delightfully eccentric in a Colonel Blimp kind of way and most complain of something (but wittily). The letters reflect the readers' average age, which is something over 50, perhaps well over.

In English custom and practice, you can be as rude as you like as long as you are witty enough with it. I recall a good friend in graduate school at Oxford who was incensed by the way his wife's boss had treated her. When my friend next met the man at a party, he went up to him and started the conversation with the observation, "I hear you are the rudest man in Oxford." The man replied to my friend with admirable brevity: "I was."

One Daily Telegraph correspondence of the past year brought to mind the tradition of English schoolmasters in my day who were expert in using disparaging wit as a mechanism of classroom control and socialization. I recall comments like, "When I want your opinion, Jones, I'll send you a telegram," or to a boy staring in silence at a Latin passage he had been asked to translate for the class, "No mistakes so far."

The comments that schoolmasters were expected to write on end-of-term reports (report cards) offered a particular opportunity for sarcasm which, I suppose, concerns about self-esteem, strengths-based feedback, and fear of litigation have now rendered obsolete.

Three exquisite gems I read with nostalgic pleasure: “When the workers of the world unite it would be presumptuous of Dewhurst to include himself among their number”; “Unlike the poor, Graham is seldom with us”; and my personal favorite, “The improvement in his handwriting has revealed his inability to spell”.