Flattering the popinjays

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1505821,00.html

 

Flattering the popinjays

 

Journalists are letting our leaders get away with murder

 

AL Kennedy

Tuesday June 14, 2005

The Guardian

 

Nostalgia's a grand thing. Hearing my former MP, Gorgeous George,

berating those bewildered senators took me back. We both hail from

Dundee and it was great to hear the old dialect again. Hardly a school

day went by without me calling someone a " Trotskyite popinjay " , and

the cries of " You throw like a big lickspittle " were frequent.

 

Another Scottish firebrand, James Maxton, once lost his parliamentary

privileges for calling Winston Churchill " a murderer " . Which would

constitute another rare sign of life from a world where arms deals,

pre-emptive invasions, environmental rape and moral collapse are

coddled in an atmosphere of courteous restraint. Churchill, for

example, said Maxton was " the greatest gentleman in the House of

Commons " - because Maxton was dead by then and nothing aids the status

quo more than politesse.

 

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But back in the 70s it seemed that things were set to change. Woodward

and Bernstein, Bill Moyers, Seymour Hersh, Sidney Schanberg - all were

emerging as top-notch investigative reporters. Plus the thought of

those sexy informants: mysterious Deep Throat and dashing Daniel

Ellsberg. It seemed that steadfast reporting and public protest could

change the world, unseat corrupt leaders, even end an unjust war. The

popinjays were getting no respect.

 

Today, of course, we have Vietnam II, the BBC is in tatters, Deep

Throat turns out to be a mad-eyed geezer with a book deal and Ellsberg

is still appealing for whistleblowers when no one will print their

revelations unless they involve pierced labia, or Castro having sex

with a dog. While all other public figures cannot appear in any format

without being at least partially naked, sexually reassigned and/or

masturbating a farm animal, our politicians are cocooned by embedded

sycophancy. Not that I'd want to see Blair stripped with his parts in

a jar and laying hands on a helpless donkey, but equally I am very

tired of bombshells such as the Downing Street memo bringing us no

nearer a transatlantic war crimes tribunal.

 

Around the globe popinjays both roundly condemn and unflinchingly

support terrorism, torture, ethnic cleansing, the deployment of WMDs,

the possession of WMDs and the imposition of chaos upon areas to be

announced. This mental effort would be immensely tiring without the

kind support of the mainstream media. Mugging Galloway on Newsnight or

hounding Clinton were much safer options than rocking the boat over

the massive fraud in the last two presidential elections, or the

much-discussed possibilities of fraud in our last election, which

seemed to evaporate as soon as the polls closed.

 

Not that I blame journalists for being cautious - 28 were killed this

year already, 53 in 2004. During our occupation of Iraq, where

journalists may or may not be specifically targeted by US troops, 63

journalists have been killed so far.

 

Then again, we are supposed to be living in a democracy where we can

speak our minds. So why do we largely inhabit a popinjay-friendly

limbo of weasel words and porn? Serbian television risks airing

footage of Serbian war crimes; we get investigations revealing that

the BNP don't like foreigners. Dahr Jamail, Greg Palast, Aaron Glantz

and others are doing their bit, but why is it so hard to find out

what's really happening in Falluja, in al-Qa'im, in Guantánamo?

Shouldn't we have access to all the facts about depleted uranium

deaths, 9/11, Iraq deaths and casualties, ID cards, the

corporate-driven EU constitution, expansion of the Patriot Act?

Shouldn't the truth be more important than flattering the popinjays,

the murderers?