(Another day, another sixties/seventies song reference eh?)
"70 years after WW2 erupted, a new battle for history rages"
That was the third story on today's Guardian. Now, I am prepared to let the "WW2" go on the grounds that despite being what I have always considered a rather vulgar and unnecessary abbreviation it was probably used for reasons of space.
However.
The article included this sentence:
"In Poland alone there are umpteen new public extravaganzas being planned."
What an odd way, don't you think, to say 'I have done absolutely no fucking research.'
Now I don't know whether the Guardian payed Ian
Traynor to travel to Poland or whether they just rang a bar in Warsaw and asked if anyone British was drinking there and whether they wouldn't mind just saying a few words about the comparative popularity of various museums but come on, "umpteen", please. Am I supposed to read that sentence and think "Umpteen? Wow really? Umpteen eh? And
that's just in Poland. I bet there are millions and
squillions across the former Communist Bloc."
Of course the Guardian does have good writers (Steve Bell, Richard Williams, Marina Hyde, Nancy Banks Smith, Louise Taylor, Martin
Kelner, etc) but it does seem to be going to shit of late. So much of what made me buy it is falling by the wayside. I know it is puerile but why did the
kakuro go but the rather bland
suduko stay? I used to like a nice
kakuro/crossword combo while I ate my breakfast - a healthy mix of mental arithmetic, general knowledge and wordplay to get the mind ticking of a morning.
The quick crossword has changed too. It sniffs off a different setter. It doesn't seem as playful as it used to be. It is less quirky. It is gravitating toward the 'near synonym' school of quick crossword that populate other newspapers. The general knowledge bits have shifted from the literary and cultural school of "Spielberg film (4)" to the quite obscure word school of "Hare's tail (4)". A quick crossword
shorn of these little kinks and mannerisms becomes a chore. It feels like it ceases to have an 'author' because it ceases to reflect a personality. It then no longer provides any interaction with the reader except for the provision of questions and answers. It becomes a joyless exam.
G2 has become increasingly lightweight. Who thought it was a good idea to bring back the
embarrassing 'pass notes' bit? Is it me or the number of celebrity interviews increasing. Has anyone, ever, been tempted to cook anything by Allegra
McEvedy? And would it be too much to ask to match up the article on food with her recipe of the week? Why have two pages saying how peppers are the new cucumbers and the not have a recipe for peppers? It is, surely, just common sense?
Now, we are going to see the end of the Technology supplement and the Sports Monthly magazine in the Observer. What will they replace it with? More Lucy
Mangan presumably. That woman is like water; if you leave a space she will fill it. Her 'me and my Tory Hubby' bits and her 'me and my collection of Puffin classics' bits and her 'me and my
crazy family' bits are slowly taking over the Guardian empire. I will happily concede that she is quickly establishing herself as the vice, nay the apex of
middle class smugness, and very successfully she has too. it is a shame though because when she started at the Guardian she seemed to have a bit of bite. Now she is wet, almost unbearably so, but perhaps as this is the way the paper is going she is just following/furthering a trend.
Bob and Roberta Smith's instillation "The Guardian is shit" at the Cell Project Space in London featured the words "What a filthy stinking compost heap of perversion is The Guardian where liberals beat their chests about third world poverty and how terrible war is while masturbating over whether it is
OK to have pheasant on your
focaccia and is
Ikea shit?" Of course the work is both
aggressive and
humorous but five years on from its showing it seems that much more accurate and that much less funny.
Why, for example, did The Guardian not have the balls to print a full front page shaming The Sun for their obvious maneuvering of a grieving mother this week? Why was it left to Steve Bell to voice disgust at the whole story? And why did The Guardian add insult to injury by publishing a facsimile of Gordon Brown's letter and then get it analysed by a handwriting 'expert'. Wasn't working out personality from handwriting rubbished decades ago? Do you think that perhaps Brown's handwriting slopes toward the top right of the page not because he is an "optimist who always looks to the positive" but because he is blind in one fucking eye?
Also, while we are on the subject, whatever one thinks of Gordon Brown, writing a letter to a bereaved mother is NOT part of his job description. He is under no obligation to write to anyone who has lost a child or a husband. It is a nice gesture though that he does write them letters and the Sun should have pointed this out to Mrs
Janes instead of using her as a pawn in their petty games.
The Guardian and their
pseudo-scientific handwriting expert/charlatan also failed to point out that the spelling mistakes were on the whole not even spelling mistakes but just bad handwriting. Is a half-blind man having bad writing a crime? Is it even news? If, a few days after my dad died I had
received a letter from the Prime Minister addressed to Mr
Jodge that said "
Sorry your dad dyed" my first reaction would not be "That should be died!!!" but "I cannot believe the Prime Minister found time to write to me, what a nice gesture." Wouldn't yours?
The whole charade of trying to shame Brown for essentially doing better than the 'right thing' fueled by the more than vague whiff of nationalistic abuse of an important charity that has tainted the last few weeks should have been stamped on by a serious left-leaning party like the Guardian. Why did they just play along? Why is Peter
Mandelson amongst the few people who have gone on record and said this is clearly a disgusting abuse of the Sun's power and an obvious
chummying up to the Tories?
The Guardian has become lightweight, trivial and now impotent. I think I may have bought my last copy today. I will use its website for football news, because if you could by the sports section seperately I would, and I will also use it to check out Steve Bell's work, but apart from that I don't think I will miss much.
Goodbye The Guardian.
