BY SEAN WALSH
If the Roman jurists were correct that institutions can be persons, then we know what sort of chap the BBC is: the once-promising head prefect who through many years of bad choices has morphed into the lowlife, untrustworthy addict.
Worse than a patron of a Victorian Limehouse opium den, the “nation’s broadcaster” has been for so long sucking on the crack pipe of cultural Marxism and associated religions of grievance that it’s now completely blind to just how much damage it’s done to itself and to those still struggling to love it.
Apparently during one of its blackouts, the BBC made a “mistake” and introduced to each other two bits of a Trump speech which really should have been kept apart.
We’ve all made mistakes like that. In the first episode of The West Wing Rob Lowe “accidentally” sleeps with a prostitute. Once, tanked out of my head, I arranged to meet my wife and my mistress at the same time and in the same pub, with predictably mixed results. Had I not spliced the two appointments together, maybe made it so that they were an hour apart, (which is what was supposed to have happened in the Trump thing) things might have turned out less final.
The unfortunate error, Editgate or Splicegate or whatever we’re to call it, and more specifically the BBC’s response to it, shows the standard pattern of junkie behaviour. If there’s one thing addicts are good at (and trust me, I know) it’s distraction. You loudly confess to the misdemeanour to draw attention away from the felony.
So instead of talking about just what can be done to get this wretched specimen into rehab and restore it to sanity, we’ve ended up all talking about Trump again. Which is always fun but not necessarily always helpful.
The BBC has done things worse than Splicegate, worse even than ignore its obligations of internal governance including that ridiculous “commitment to impartiality”. Worse even than its frequent relapses into homicidal empathy with (the right sort of) terrorist organisations and the continued grotesquerie of the standard Question Time audience.
No, the BBC’s deeper transgressions involve the English language and what it’s done to it which is to denude it of its organic beauty via the imposition of speech codes ordered not to “neutrality” but to the enforced conformity with leftist ideology. All drunks mangle their words and slur their speech, but rarely do they insist that we must as well, on grounds of inclusivity.
I don’t expect journalists to be impartial because to use words in interesting ways makes that impossible. To speak is to create. And yes, truth is important (as it must be given that it’s the activity of God in creation) but it’s unrealistic to expect the hacks to have any more discernment than the rest of us.
Truth is mediated to us via the apophatic and hesitant speculations of poets, mystics, philosophers and pure mathematicians, not the soy-latte circle jerk morning briefings of media studies graduates sitting in ghastly modernist buildings in central London.
Journalists aren’t good enough, intellectually, morally, spiritually, to do truth. That’s fine. I just wish they’d stop pretending otherwise. These people are as good as car mechanics. What you expect from your garage is not “truth” but some basic professionalism which will allow you to drive to your (other) mistress’s house without breaking down on the way. The BBC Charter is, to put it another way, a codified conceit which arrogates to itself the wisdom of Solomon so it can screw you for several hundred pounds a year.
In his recent book Kingdom of Cain Andrew Klavan makes the true point that the function of ideology is to make sin look good so that we end up feeling relaxed about saying and doing bad things. This is the conjuring trick of secular materialism and its leftist political offspring. Abortion thereby becomes seen as a right and not the murderous rebellion against the divine will it really is. Terrorists become freedom fighters and men women by linguistic fiat.
You begin by casually changing the names of capital cities and you end by insisting that Adam’s breast milk is functionally and biologically equivalent to Eve’s.
You start thinking like this it becomes impossible to just think your way out of it again. This is now the BBC’s pathology – ideological substance abuse, mainlined via the bastardisation of natural language.
The question of the licence fee, the BBC’s tribute money, therefore answers itself. You should refuse to pay it as an act of love. Yes, you get Strictly and some decent Nordic noir to go with the newsroom dysfunctionality, but this is just the organisation being a functioning addict, and functioning addicts inevitably malfunction.
I’ll put the point differently. If you’re the person who gives money to the destitute drunk crouched on the pavement spluttering nonsense about Nietzsche and Foucault, then you’re being played. For several years I was that person. Your money only made me worse.