Public Enemy

Being a public figure is a fraught business these days, even for those who only occupy barely a sliver of the reediest of limelight. The wrong word selection or poor phrasing and suddenly you’re more of a pariah than Bashar al-Assad. No wonder Herman Cain was so non-committal in describing what he would do regarding the Libyan revolution.
Robert Peston has received flak this week, not for being a stooge of the Murdochs (the BBC has rightly handed more tabloid journalistic bad behaviour to others) but for twittering the phrase “Queer Street” - as in if it hadn’t been for prudent debt-management measures, the UK would be in “Queer Street and Skid Row.” He gets a flurry of criticism from the ignorant mob and has to post dictionary definitions that show the term “Queer Street” has zilch to do with homosexuality (used by Charles Dickens, it is traditionally understood to mean someone who is in financial difficulties). Mind you, having an open-feed twitter account does expose you to the banal outrage from dulled minds that football phone-ins generate, only 24/7 instead of a few hours.
More caught in the frenzied zeitgeist of thought control, Jason Gardiner, the ‘Mr Nasty’ of the judging panel of the reality show Dancing on Ice has had to come out and defend himself for being robbed on the street. Or rather how he described his attackers (again on Twitter), saying that he had been “mugged by two hooded black youths in Stockwell who held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me, all for an iPhone.” He has been lambasted as racist by people saying it was not necessary to state that they were black. It was not necessary to state that they were hooded, a dreadful slur on all those who choose to wear hoodies. Why, even calling them youths, is tremendous insult to the young of this country. Indeed, not all muggers hold knives to throats – the mugging community must be flabbergasted at this libel.
In a similar vein, Steve Williams, Tiger Woods’ former caddie, has been excoriated for the remark at a golfers’ dinner that the win for his boss Adam Scott was a way of sticking it to that ‘black arsehole’. I would say that this is descriptive rather than pejorative. The rough-and-ready Williams could have put it better but if he had just said ‘arsehole’ without prefacing it, people would have drawn conclusions that it was Woods but it could have been, conceivably, Greg Norman or someone else with whom Williams had fallen out. But there is only one world-famous golfer whose skin colour could be termed as black and so everyone in that hall would know exactly who he was talking about. I can’t believe that Williams caddied for Woods’ for ten years yet harboured a racist underside – it’s simply ridiculous to suggest so yet commentators faint in shame at this ‘betrayal’. How about the betrayal felt by Williams, standing by Woods through all his marital and personal travails, only to be dumped unceremoniously like a sweaty shirt because Woods feels he needs to freshen things up. That explains Williams’ anger, Scott’s understanding and Woods’ stoic silence. It is all the hyper-ventilating by those in the media bubble, stirring up controversy to make themselves appear more important, as they seek to ban words that are colours from the English language.
Far more problematic is John Terry’s expletive-laden tirade against Anton Ferdinand in which the word ‘black’ is sandwiched. His excuse that he was using expletives to show that he wasn’t using ‘black’ scornfully seems bizarre. It is in this instance that the word need not have cropped up at all – it seems actively to be part of the insult. Ferdinand could be mocked for playing for a certain north-east England club last season but mentioning his skin colour in this context is out of order at the very least. If he had faced off against a, say, South Korean in another game and used ‘yellow’ inbetween very offensive swearing, it would be just as unacceptable. It is a modern trend that people can do or say racist things in earnest but call them racist and they are apoplectic or in denial. They are happy to be pejorative about others of a different race but don’t like treatment of labelling when it is applied to them. They are more offended by the term ‘racist’ than its actual validity.
On the extreme end of this was Ron Atkinson’s foul-mouthed rant about Marcel Desailly in 2004 when he thought his microphone was switched off. Not only did he use the overtly racist n-word but his whole ‘analysis’ saying that Desailly was lazy in an expression that when coupled with the n-word, one could not get a more complete picture of prejudice. Atkinson was rightly sacked from both ITV and The Guardian (the latter having an interim replacement of Andy Gray, later disgraced as an unreconstructed sexist). He may have brought through coloured players under his tutelage in the 1970s when other clubs would not but now that looks as patronising, white-man’s-burden paternalism, rather than striving for and believing in equality. Atkinson’s later bafflement that some rappers and black kids addressed each other with the n-word could not comprehend that this was an attempt to devalue the term to hurt racists and that as Atkinson’s ancestors had not been stolen or sold from their homeland and forced to work as slaves, he was forbidden from using some words. A pathetic excuse for the whole beyond-the-pale phraseology he deployed.
There is a scale and a line. Some people can be more racist than others but all racism is intolerable, as is sexism, homophobia and all forms of trying to demean. Richard Herring on his radio show examined why the first three things were off-limits to comedians but mental illness was not. The irony was that some mainstream comedians think of themselves as non-racist but use the abusive concept ‘mong’ quite freely even though its origins (unlike that of Queer Street in terms of homosexuality) are inherently racialist, believing those of an East Asian complexion are more stupid than Caucasians. This incenses me – such comedians must be of a lower-order of intelligence than their fellow humans, whatever the offender’s ethnicity.
What I don’t like is the self-righteous demagoguery against people who say or write things when seeking purely to illustrate a situation rather than aiming to be derogatory of a person’s ethnicity or such like. Len Goodman is attacked for calling his fellow Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel-Horwood “a silly little sod.” Now Revel-Horwood being gay and the term ‘sod’ in some circles an abbreviation for sodomite was not at all what Goodman was thinking of. Revel-Horwood was more piqued that Goodman was disagreeing with him rather than the put-down. In fact, until today I always thought the insult was referring to clump of earth, seeking to intimate that the person on the receiving end should be trodden all over. What a close-call that could have been for our ever more intolerantly tolerant future. Leonard Cohen once composed the song “Jazz Police” and the couplet “Jazz Police are looking through my folders/Jazz Police have got their final orders” has the ring of the times we live in. As gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell - not usually one for restraint - commented in the Robert Peston case “people are being oversensitive.” Quite.