Monocultures are prone to infirmity and disease, which perhaps explains The Guardian’s laughable attempt to characterise a journalist who believes in free speech as a witless promoter of anti-semitism. When everyone thinks the same, one fool’s braying is lost in the racket of the herd.
Like an elevator formerly occupied by a passenger afflicted with terminal flatulence, a visit to The Guardian Australia website serves as a sharp reminder that noxious emanations linger noisomely in small, tight, closed-off spaces. As Bertholt Brecht lamented of his contemporaries’ insistence on pouring their talents into the mundane when the workers’ paradise had yet to be realised, “They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes.” Pardon the irony in quoting a red-raggin’ propagandist and totalitarian publicist in regard to a red-raggin’ publication with a pronounced affection for greenish jackboots, but the agit-propping dramatist’s observation is too delicious to resist. Here we are, the left’s march through the institutions long ago complete, yet in The Guardian’s strange and sealed little eco-system the same old battle cries and campfire songs echo yet. Suggest that journalists of the modern breed are bitchily contemptuous of free speech and intolerant of any opinions but their own, as the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann did last week in The Australian, and the truth of that observation is immediately confirmed by something akin to an eruption of explosive peristalsis. The offence against leftist presumption to solely determine what can be discussed and how, having been duly digested, prompts an immediate rumbling in the literary bowel until, after a period of authorial grimacing and discomfort, it spurts noisily forth in a gaseous bum burp as short on substance as it is foully obnoxious. Here, the effusions of former journalism academic and current Guardian contributor Jason Wilson come immediately to mind.
It is quite the case study, Wilson’s excoriation of Uhlmann, but very much of a piece with his earlier and no less gassy gushers. Not long ago, for example, he displayed a unique talent for finding perfidy in the prosaic by denouncing the faddish paleo diet as an assault on women and feminism. That expose should not be missed, especially by those who find amusement in the bizarre, but do set aside more than what might normally be considered adequate time to absorb a few hundred words of the merely tendentious. Some will laugh until they cry, and those tears will blur the vision as thoroughly as does the author’s compulsion to make everything, even plates of offal, symptoms of the right’s cleverly concealed and ever-sinister intentions. As a former Canberra University academic, Wilson cannot have worked in close proximity to Professor Matthew Ricketson, co-author of the infamous Finkelstein review, without having what seems a congenital inclination to useful idiocy greatly enhanced. The Finkelstein opus, it should be remembered, recommended the jailing of recalcitrant editors (see below), so there is another alleged journalist opposed to unfiltered free speech.
