If you follow me on Twitter you may already have seen me go into Hulk-smash mode about Guardian education writer Janet Murray’s article, “Why I sent my child to a private school.” Here’s my (slightly) more reasoned response:

Firstly, I won’t scold individual parents deciding they want to go private. I’m sure at least some of my friends will go down that route and, though I may disagree, I’m not going to lecture them at one of those Islington dinner parties us strawman liberals are alleged to attend every weekend. I know there are situations — for example extreme bullying, behavioural issues or unusually poor teachers — that might lead some parents to decide that their current school isn’t working. Just have the decency not to pretend that you’re taking a brave stand against an overwhelming tide of left-wing militancy that doesn’t actually, y’know, exist.

Murray’s article is a classic mugged-by-reality conversion tale, like the recurring Daily Mail story where a repentant vegetarian poses happily with a bacon sandwich and makes jokes about lentils. In this narrative a liberal belief is a naive fairy tale that collapses on impact with the brutal truth. Or at least this one starts out that way. By the sixth paragraph she’s admitting “deep down I don’t think I ever really had a problem with private education”. By the tenth she’s approvingly quoting free-market hardliner Niall Ferguson. She isn’t abandoning a principle because she never held it in the first place. If her opinions were so flimsy and easily led back then, I’m not sure why we should listen to her new ones now.

The worst thing about Murray’s article is that she extrapolates her personal experience into a celebration of private schools and an attack on state ones. It’s an insult to the teachers, the children and the parents at those institutions. One thing defensive private school parents always say is that they want the best for their kids, the inevitable implication being that anyone chooses a state school doesn’t — that there could be no earthly reason why anyone who could afford a private school wouldn’t choose one. Well, it’s called principle. A weird concept, I know. Some people actually (a) trust state schools to educate their kids, (b) think that a school that reflects its environment, rather than being stuffed to the gills with wealthy white kids, might have social advantages, and (c) think that the private system is an indefensible means of cementing privilege.

I attended a private school, on hugely reduced fees, as did my oldest friend. I’m grateful for the education it gave me.  It had some excellent teachers who cared deeply about their pupils. It also had layers of class snobbery which made me sick, no girls until sixth-form and so few non-white pupils that I can still name all of them. But my experience is irrelevant. Purely on principle — that word again — I think the system should be abolished, or, more realistically, lose the charitable status which means the taxpayer funds them to the tune of £100 million a year. Contra Murray, it is far and away the major obstacle to class mobility and equality of opportunity in Britain.

My daughter goes to a local state school. It happens to be a church school but there was no “lying or cheating” (Murray again) involved. We said we weren’t religious; they let our daughter in anyway; it happens sometimes. So far, the school has handily disproved all of Murray’s smears on the state sector. It has a strong discipline, high standards and attends to each pupil’s individual needs. It’s not the kind of beacon high achiever that drives up house prices and causes middle-class nervous breakdowns during application season, but it’s a fine school with a tremendous sense of community and inclusiveness. The society inside that school is the same society I walk through to get there every morning and, despite many obstacles, it works.

Despite her initial protestations, I don’t believe Murray was ever remotely left-wing. She speaks the language of the pure market, where you choose a school like you choose a childminder or a masseuse. “Until local schools meet families’ needs and cater for each individual child, can you blame people for putting their hand in their pocket?” Yes, I can actually, because if you are raised by well-educated parents who value reading and learning then, congratulations, you are already privileged. Every state-school teacher I know says that the bright middle-class kids, except in very unusual circumstances, are bound to do well. The ones that might benefit from a private education are the ones (a few scholarships and assisted places aside) who don’t stand a chance in hell of getting one. A socially mixed school, instead of a ghettoised one, benefits every pupil.

Murray has the gall to suggest she is doing less privileged kids a favour by freeing up a space, whereas in fact she is simply withdrawing herself from them and leaving them to their own devices. In London, where different social classes live cheek by jowl, this feels like a particular betrayal: I’ll live down the street from you but there’s no way I’ll let my kids attend the same school as yours. Of course, state schools could be better — they always can — but their chances are hurt if affluent middle-class parents won’t even consider them an option.

In an excellent recent Times piece (sadly paywalled) calling for the withdrawal of charitable status, Matthew Parris examined another motive for private education beyond mere performance:

I maintain that the reasons many parents choose to pay for private education are a tangle between educational and social ambitions, and these are not the same. You’d want a child, I’d want my child, to learn the relaxed and breezy confidence, the loose manner, the intangible sense of entitlement, that comes with a good private education in Britain. There does exist a ruling class in Britain and you’d want your child to join it.

This is not education, but privilege. The purchase of an expensive education is, in part, the purchase of privilege; the social advantage of your child over other children. I am not persuaded that this is the “public benefit” that our definition of a charity requires it to offer. And I dismiss out of hand the hoary old argument that private schools save taxpayers the cost of educating pupils in state schools. You might as well claim charitable status for your car on the ground that it saves local authorities the cost of subsidising your seat on the bus.

I think he’s nailed it. “Five years ago, if someone had told me I’d have a child at private school, I’d have laughed,” writes Murray. “I’d have said I resented parents buying privilege through private education.” Well she may not resent it anymore but that’s exactly what she’s done. By using the cowardly argument that private schools only thrive because of the failure of the state system, she is pretending she had no choice, but of course she did. We all do. Having made those choices, the least we can do is be honest about them.

July 24, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: Dorian Lynskey . Comments: 33 Comments

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie’s birth. I don’t have time to write much here – it’s all in the second chapter of the book anyway – so instead I refer you to Ed Vulliamy, Billy Bragg and this ringing endorsement from John Steinbeck:

He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh-voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American Spirit.

July 13, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: Dorian Lynskey . Comments: 1 Comment

On Saturday morning, in an item on Radio 4’s Today programme to mark the centenary of Enoch Powell’s birth, presenter Justin Webb asked Daily Mail writer Simon Heffer, “Was Enoch Powell racist?” Heffer paused for a moment while he pretended to weigh the question up and then replied, inevitably, “No, not at all.”

We live in a time where nobody will admit to being racist, even people who say and write the kind of things that a racist might well say or write. In 2012, if a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan were caught mid-cross-burning, he would swiftly explain that of course he isn’t racist and he has a black friend and he was just drunk and he’s very sorry for any offence caused and obviously racism is a terrible thing. But surely the man famous for the most notorious speech in the history of British race relations can still safely be described as racist?

Apparently not. Heffer, who published a mammoth biography of Powell in 1998, maintained on Today that Powell’s 1968 “rivers of blood” speech wasn’t about race at all, but immigration, as if the two could be cleanly separated. I would like to have seen Heffer explain to one of the black families persecuted after Powell’s speech that the issue wasn’t the colour of their skin — oh dearie me, no — but their presence in Britain. I’m sure the distinction would have cheered them up as they scrubbed the graffiti from their front door. (Inconveniently for Heffer, fellow guest Michael Cockerell remembered Powell telling him. “What’s wrong with racism? Racism is the basis of nationality.” Oops.)

Heffer went on to point out that Powell loved India and had hoped, pre-independence, to be appointed viceroy. See, he loved brown people so much he wanted to be their colonial overseer! He mentioned that Powell read ancient Greek at the age of 15 and could speak 14 languages, at one point stuttering the mantra, “He was a very clever man,” as if racism were the exclusive domain of the stupid. I wonder if he’s ever seen this clip from The Simpsons:

Webb somewhat apologetically suggested that the speech might have been “pretty incautious” but declined to press the point, and the item ended with everyone laughing about Powell’s love of doing impressions of people on Antiques Roadshow. Good times.

Heffer is no crank pariah. There’s an ongoing effort on the right to rehabilitate Powell. In a mealy-mouthed piece in the Telegraph on Saturday, Ed West did the “very clever man” routine (Powell picked Wagner, Beethoven and Haydn on Desert Island Discs, don’t you know?), threw in some flattering anecdotes and skipped daintily past the rivers of blood to focus on one area where Powell might feel vindicated: his Euroscepticism. Let’s remind ourselves of what West left out.

Firstly, the speech was no gaffe or unguarded remark but a calculated provocation. A few days earlier, Powell had told a friend, “I’m going to make a speech at the weekend and it’s going to go up ‘fizz’ like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up.” Secondly, he chose to quote the most explosive and alarmist comments from his constituents: “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”; “When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.” If he were not interested in race-baiting, he need not have used that language. Thirdly, he wasn’t merely expressing reservations about multiculturalism — he was saying that immigrants had no right to be here in the first place. Fourthly, racial assaults, both verbal and physical, increased immediately after the speech, as if Powell had given racists the green light — in one instance white youths attacked Asians with metal bars outside a school in Southall. The likes of MP Paul Boateng and actor Sanjeev Bhaskar have talked about the mood in the playground and the street changing the very next day. In a piece for the Institute of Race Relations Jenny Bourne writes: “The point that is missed by almost every commentator to date is that Powell, though he might have echoed sentiments of his West Midlands voters, actually went on to create the Rivers of Blood he warned against. The blood shed was not that of the White English – clearly what Powell feared in the wake of US ‘race riots’ in the late 1960s – but of the Black newcomers, which is why it went largely unreported.”

It was hardly the most progressive era and yet the establishment rounded on Powell. Edward Heath sacked him from the shadow cabinet while the Times editorial called it “an evil speech” which “appealed to racial hatred”. To Ed West, it seems, they were all a bunch of politically correct lefties. One section of his piece begs to be quoted in full:

Certainly it was inflammatory in tone, and when a West Indian christening party was attacked soon after by yobs heard to shout “Powell”, the media was quick to erect a cordon sanitaire around his views. Yet there was, if anything, more violence from the Left. Powell’s constituency home was attacked, there were bomb threats when he was due to address universities, an edition of Any Questions had to me moved, and a planned visit to his old school was abandoned for fear of disruption.

Yes, you read that correctly. Never mind the people who had their faces slashed at a christening — they had to move Any Questions!

West stops short of spraying “Enoch Was Right” on the wall but only just. “Was he right? To a certain extent.” Really? To what extent? He was wrong to compare the British situation to race riots in America and communitarian tensions in India. He was wrong to say that the only solution to racial tension was to stop non-white people entering the country. He was wrong to predict race war, although he kept at it, cropping up like a crazy old uncle in 1976 (saying race war would make the Troubles in Northern Ireland “enviable”) and 1981 (saying that the summer’s riots threatened “civil war”). Wrong every time, unless you’re Anders Behring Breivik.

Back to West. “And yet the profound cultural changes following 1968 made it impossible to address these issues, with the rise of television as the dominant political medium and the decline of religion. A new generation wanted their politics to make them feel good about themselves, and to define moral worth.”

Ah, so we don’t like Enoch Powell because we’re all godless telly addicts who can’t handle the truth? No, it’s because of Powell’s hysterical talk of “piccaninnies” and “the whip hand” and “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” that the subject became toxic in mainstream politics. Enoch Powell’s biggest enemy wasn’t Ted Heath or students picketing Any Questions: it was Enoch Powell. By mistaking his own extreme pessimism and racist paranoia for fearless clarity, he brought misery to the lives of many British citizens, ruined his political career and even damaged his own cause. For a man who could speak 14 languages, that doesn’t seem very clever after all.

June 18, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: Dorian Lynskey . Comments: 34 Comments

Pussy Riot, the Russian anti-Putin Riot Grrrls are still being detained after their April 19 trial, threatened with up to seven years in jail. Amnesty and PEN are among the groups campaigning for their release. Two strong pieces here: Salon’s AM Gittlitz gives some useful background on punk in Russia, including the fabulpus observation that one Russian website translates the band’s name as “Uprising of the Uterus”, while Tobi Vail (of original Riot Grrrls Bikini Kill) raves about the band for emusic, calling them “the only band that matters in 2012″ and throwing in a fine radical punk playlist. There’s also a website lobbying for their release. Here’s the “Punk Prayer” performance in church that led to their arrest.

April 30, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: Dorian Lynskey . Comments: 1 Comment

It was when I was studying Twelfth Night for GCSE English that I first heard the useful definition of a certain kind of comic character: someone who perceives himself in a vastly different way to how everyone else perceives him. Gervais, both a fan and a student of comedy, knows (or used to know) that this chasm is where the biggest laughs can usually be found. The problem is that this is also a useful definition of a certain kind of celebrity.

Before we get to last night’s Derek, it’s worth remembering just how astute Gervais can be. David Brent may have been an office manager but the documentary-maker’s camera encouraged him to act like a minor celebrity. Every look to camera, whether conspiratorial or beseeching, was an attempt to cement in the viewer’s mind his image of himself as a “chilled out entertainer”, and every eye-rolling look from his staff confirmed that it wasn’t working. Unlike the US remake, with its richer cast of characters and more sympathetic lead, Gervais’s The Office was a comedy about performance and delusion — one of the very best. The concluding Christmas special delivered the perfect punchline, with the post-documentary Brent achieving his destiny as a fifteen-minute celebrity.

Just as Martin Scorsese, who was struggling to acclimatise to fame when he made The King of Comedy, said he saw his younger self in the desperate hustling of Rupert Pupkin, Gervais was close enough to obscurity himself in 2000 to feel Brent’s pain. Suddenly given the keys to the castle, he shrewdly chose to play a needy outsider in Extras: a moth flapping around the flame of real stardom.

The reason he’s never quite hit the mark since then is that he’s lost touch with failure and appears incapable of mocking his own success. The highlight of the bad-but-not-as-bad-as-people-say Life’s Too Short was a murderously humourless Liam Neeson’s attempt to restyle himself as a stand-up comic, believing that willpower and starpower alone could usher blood from a stone.

The nadir for me was the scene in which Gervais, imperious behind his desk and surrounded like some vainglorious monarch by emblems of his previous triumphs, botches a Skype call with Steve Carell about making lucrative guest appearances to The Office. Gervais complains that his snafu has just cost him millions of dollars, the implication being that The Office has already earned him many millions more. We are invited to laugh at a very rich man’s failure to become a bit richer, while it’s left to Warwick Davies to be the desperate loser, clinging with his fingernails to his small sliver of fame.

Is this just what success does to you? It’s safe to say that I will never have to cope with the mind-warping effects of vast fame and money, so who knows? Maybe if Steve Coogan’s Hollywood career had led to Oscar glory, he wouldn’t be the smart self-satiriser he is in The Trip or Coffee and Cigarettes. And maybe if Ben Stiller hadn’t grown up in the industry he couldn’t have maintained his genuine, caustically funny cynicism about showbusiness throughout his career from The Cable Guy to Zoolander to Tropic Thunder to his cameos in Extras and The Trip.

At any rate success seems to have made Ricky Gervais the kind of character he used to mine for laughs, incapable of taking criticism or realising how he comes across. Despite the ongoing backlash which reached its tipping point with the “mong” incident, the issue for me is not whether Ricky Gervais a good person (who am I to judge that?) but whether he still a good writer and performer.

I would love that to be the case but Derek, unfortunately, suggests not. Some critics’ anger at the portrayal of a man who, without getting into the kind of armchair diagnosis that Gervais finds it easy to deny, is what used to be called a simpleton led me to expect a streak of mocking cruelty. On the contrary, notwithstanding a couple of moments of misjudged slapstick, it’s as sappy and right-minded as the omnipresent sad piano music. A better actor wouldn’t have reduced the character to a basket of tics and soulful looks. A better script wouldn’t have had him say, “It’s more important to be kind than to be clever or good-looking.”

Leaving aside whether one wants to be lectured on kindness by Ricky Gervais, the problem here isn’t that Derek is a target for ridicule but that he’s a holy fool seeing the world through miraculously innocent eyes. Spike Lee once complained about the “Magical Negro”: the wise, folksy, disadvantaged black man who crops up in movies like The Hudsucker Proxy and The Green Mile in order to point the white lead towards enlightenment. Well, Derek is the Magical Simpleton, heir to the likes of Forrest Gump, Sean Penn in I Am Sam, and Ben Stiller’s Simple Jack.

The harder it yanks the heartstrings the more Derek comes to resemble Being There minus its central joke. In the Peter Sellers movie Chance the Gardener is assigned gnomic wisdom he doesn’t possess by people who sentimentalise childlike simplicity. Here there’s no such satirical energy. Derek, though annoying, is right and true while the world around him is blinkered and corrupt and he ultimately bathes everyone in his warm, Gumpish glow, leaving no space for either comedy or drama. Both the most poignant and most comic thing about it is how far out of his depth Gervais is an actor. If he were less powerful then somebody close to him might have felt able to gently suggest that the whole thing was self-regarding folly: the kind of sanctimonious guff which the younger, sharper Gervais might have poked fun at as a show-within-a-show on Extras.

But I can understand why Gervais and his ferociously loyal fans ( “fuck off you over analysing twat”, one told me on Twitter last night) think the advance criticism of Derek was overstated or misdirected. It’s condescending rather than nasty and the only really offensive thing is how its credits casually list the bullying women as “chavs in pub”. In fact mentally or physically disabled characters in Gervais shows have always been smart, resilient, likeable types morally simplified in order to make the person treating them badly look worse (this moral clarity being the alibi for all the jokes about the disability, of course). It’s braver and rarer to have a disabled character being as obnoxious as anyone else, like the wheelchair user in one episode of The Inbetweeners. That’s closer to equality than Gervais’s put-upon saints, just as a strong black villain in Hollywood is more progressive than another faultless Magical Negro.

Anyway, I suspect the critics who fret about Derek becoming a shorthand insult for a whole group of people, just as Vicky Pollard did, are worrying unduly. On the evidence so far, it’s simply not good enough to catch on.

Note: I strongly recommend Tom Sutcliffe’s smart, balanced review in The Independent.

April 13, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: Dorian Lynskey . Comments: 4 Comments

All last year when I was promoting the book I wistfully said it would be great if an established multi-platinum British pop star released an out-and-out protest song that was witty, nuanced, relevant, exciting and commercial enough to be playlisted on Radio 1. And here it is.

UPDATE: I wrote about Ill Manors for the Guardian which led, indirectly, to two very different but equally wrongheaded responses: one by contrarian clown Brendan O’Neill, the other a dogmatic hard-left reading by Josh Hall at The Line Of Best Fit, who bizarrely criticises Plan B for not accepting that “It is the destruction of capital that will end poverty.” Both seem to attack Ill Manors chiefly for not conforming to their own analysis of the riots, rather than for any artistic failings. The idea that a record might be complex and ambivalent does not some to have occurred to either of them. In fact, I wonder what protest songs do meet their peculiar standards.

March 13, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: Dorian Lynskey . Comments: Comments Off

You can learn a lot about a man by the tenor of the tributes he receives. When conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart suffered a fatal heart attack yesterday, aged just 43, he was predictably lionised as a feisty patriot by the GOP, but Ann Coulter praised him for annoying liberals (“I think he enjoyed it even more than I do”) and James Delingpole, who regards the likes of Breitbart with the moony-eyed adoration of a One Direction fan, gushed on the Telegraph blog: “Breitbart’s greatest speciality was lefty-baiting.”

Breitbart would doubtless have enjoyed the emphasis because throughout his career he regarded politics as a game in which angering your opponents mattered more than championing your own ideals. He was a mediocre intellect but a showman of genius. The word troll is often misapplied but Breitbart fitted the definition to a tee: “One who posts a deliberately provocative message… with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument.”

This is not a simple question of right v left. When you read Melanie Phillips on the right or Seumas Milne on the left, their tone may be humourless, scornful and dogmatic but it is in the service of sincere moral principle. Breitbart’s rhetoric and stunts were, above all, entertainment. Stoking hatred and misunderstanding was his idea of fun. That’s why obits that celebrate his gusto and sense of humour make me like him even less. Given how much damage he caused I’d rather he’d been a fanatical moralist than a dangerous clown. As level-headed conservative David Frum puts it:

In fact, it’s hard even to use the word “issues” in connection with Andrew Breitbart. He may have used the words “left” and “right,” but it’s hard to imagine what he ever meant by those words. He waged a culture war minus the “culture,” as a pure struggle between personalities. Hence his intense focus on President Obama: only by hating a particular political man could Breitbart bring any order to his fundamentally apolitical emotions.

The internet was his playground, just as radio is Rush Limbaugh’s. On a bad day the internet can seem like a 24-hour rage machine, forever sacrificing nuance and empathy for the exhilarating spewing of venom. Breitbart had a gift for marshalling the worst aspects of the medium —minute-by-minute opinionating, fickle viral buzz, false information, conspiracy theories and flamboyant abuse — to extend his own influence and celebrity. Rage is natural and sometimes justifiable but he treated it as a commodity which he delivered with assembly-line efficiency. In her 2010 New Yorker profile of Breitbart Rebecca Mead wrote: “No battle is too petty for Breitbart, no target too small or pathetic.”

As an illustration, let’s compare Delingpole’s glowing assessment of Breitbart’s “speciality” — “One of his favourite techniques was simply to turn up at lefty rallies with a camera crew, film all the snarling abuse he got and then put it up on his website by way of demonstration of just how snarlingly vile, sanctimonious and devoid of intelligent argument the liberal-left tends to be most of the time” — with this clip of the man addressing Occupy protesters. See if you can spot the snarling abuser.

No wonder Delingpole worshipped him. The Telegraph blogger and writer of unreadable books is a conservative troll in the American mould, whose website bio ends, rather pathetically, with a bid to join their club: “If any right-wing US think tanks want to offer a visiting fellowship or any presenters’ slots fall available on Fox News you know where to go.” It’s a lucrative business. The politics shelves of American airport bookstores are overwhelmed by shrill, paranoid screeds with titles such as Coulter’s latest: Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. The conservative troll can make a comfortable living banging the war drums on Fox News and speaking tours, where the familiar rhetorical tricks and rituals of outrage are as artfully choreographed as 1970s wrestling. In Britain, sadly for him, Delingpole has to make do with appearing on the BBC in order to say what an awful Marxist conspiracy the BBC is. You can find the same cynical showbiz approach in the work of superannuated bad boy Rod Liddle and the preposterous Brendan O’Neill, who maintains that he’s left-wing even as he sticks unfailingly to the standard Telegraph blog line. “What do I believe?” is always second to “What will annoy the lefty chattering classes?”

It’s all jolly fun for the professional trolls but this game has consequences, especially in the US. “It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous,” writes Frum. Breitbart’s cavalier disregard for facts (witness his loathsome treatment of Shirley Sherrod) and tolerance of conspiracy theories (which sprang anew after his death) has helped to debase internet discourse. His polarising language has contributed to the dysfunctional paralysis of a US political system that was designed on the assumption that bipartisan consensus was occasionally possible and can barely operate if politics is reduced to hating and crushing and winning at every turn. The White House and Congress are distracted from addressing serious, long-term issues by ridiculous manufactured showdowns like the one over the debt ceiling last summer.

Breitbart didn’t invent these problems but he gleefully exacerbated them with a reckless disregard for the consequences. People who consumed Breitbart’s venom and misinformation without realising the rules of the game became ever more paranoid and vengeful, prepared to believe that Obama was not just a Kenyan muslim but a murderer of political opponents. Frum has written about US conservatism’s alternative reality, where uncomfortable facts are not allowed to intrude, and people like Breitbart and Limbaugh are partly responsible for sustaining it. They have helped to turn American political debate into a giant internet comment thread, where fairness, empathy and ambiguity are for losers and only the angriest and most unyielding prevail.

Just as depressing is the idea that he was a pioneer of online journalism. Yes, he worked on the Drudge Report and co-founded the Huffington Post but he died with just one notable piece of journalism to his name: the 2009 undercover sting on ACORN. The rest is the kind of furious white noise that the internet has never lacked. All that energy and opportunity on the new digital frontier and he reduced it to snark, smears and shrieking belligerence. What a waste.

One thing you could say for Breitbart is that he could take it as well as dish it out. Unlike the pitiful Delingpole, who gloats about annoying “libtards” but stonewalls and blocks anybody on Twitter who responds in kind, Breitbart was up for a scrap. So the conservatives who wring their hands about “vile” lefties who don’t respect the fallen (and let’s see how they react when, say, Michael Moore dies) do their hero a disservice. An obnoxious and merciless attack dog (revisit his response to Ted Kennedy’s death) invites an obnoxious and merciless obit like this one from Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi (“Good! Fuck him”). One can feel sorry for Breitbart’s family while still being glad that his relentless flow of toxic bullshit has finally ceased. Journalism and politics are better off without him.

March 2, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: Dorian Lynskey . Comments: 3 Comments