Tuesday 22 November 2011

DIGNITY AND THE NEW MEDIA WHORES.

There may be gradations of grief and anger and sorrow relating to the loss of a child, maybe a loss to illness is marginally easier to take than a loss to murder, maybe even a loss to quick, angry murder is easier to bear than a loss to sadistic or sexual torture and murder.  It's all shit. And whatever the individual horror of child death, it must be, for most people, as bad as it gets,  a place from which there is no return;  that's certainly what it looks like in those 'photos of Blair's Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here, of course, we do things differently;  here people  do not clutch at and present  child corpses  for the cold eye of the camera. Here, child murder has learned a new, shrill, unBritish vocabulary. Accusatory and demanding, victims' relatives demand a change in this or that law, demand an extended hearing, demand their own celebrity, one poor cow even imagining a close friendship with the repulsive  Murdoch witch,  Rebekka Shitemouth.

It's hard to remain stonefaced about these people, shouting about the dead.  I do wish, though, for their own sake and for the general good, that  they would shut  the fuck up and deal with it, it's theirs to deal with, nobody else's, but I understand the lure to them of fragmentary celebrity, of anything, really, which diverts them from the necessary process of grieving  including as it inevitably does many moments  of self-finger-pointing, sleepless nights of If only I'd done this, if only I'd said  that.  

Mr Winehouse was a hoot, flying back from his recording session in New York to launch a charity in the name of his dead dipso daughter, to speak Estuary wisdom to the press about issues of dependancy. Just a shame he didn't speak to poor Amy a wee bit more forcefully, eh.  Maybe put her over his fucking knee.  But, hey, we mustn't say that, mustn't be, what is it, judgemental ?  And she did leave a huge legacy of fabulous music. Which will live on.  Even if she won't.  

There was a time when people would have rebuked Mitch for his irresponsibility, his fame-crazy arseholeing.  Now we listen reverently to  his  shallow cliches of parental worthlessness.  This is the New World Order, too.  It's not just vain, greedy charlatans like  MPs, it is a population desperate for celebrity.  Doesn't matter what it's about, just get me on the telly.

I must say I don't care for the Dowlers, I can't warm to anything about them, like Gerry and Cilla McCann, they give me the creeps, she, particularly, looks belligerent, calculating  and whiny, and I thought that their daughter was, in a sadly typical, neglectful  way, narcissistic and over-sexualised  -  or to put it more pithily, jailbait.

I simply cannot understand how so many screech that it is their right to allow their children to behave in a way apparently carefully  calculated to arouse lust in the loins of the unGodly and then appear mystified when that lust runs its wretched course.  Our premature sexualisation of children may not be historically unique but it is a most regrettable development during my lifetime and every image I have seen of the late Milly Dowler is faintly disturbing.  I have known, you see, middle-ranking nonces who would have seen Milly Dowler as a provocative young tart, would have convinced themselves that she was actually crying out for them to rape her and that, because she was such a little slut, deserved post-rape punishment.  We don't know if Milly Dowler was sexually assaulted but the man convicted of her killing, Levi Bellfield,  is known to have an  obsession relating to sex with schoolgirls. Now, it's no use saying that this Mr Bellfield's behaviour is wrong, of course it's wrong but if you would protect your children from Mr Opportunist Nonce, like him,  your best bet is to keep them behaving and dressing modestly. It's not a huge price to pay for child safety.
They have capitulated on their privacy and are, within reason, as is anyone, fair game but I don't mean to harangue Mr and Mrs Dowler,  even if I could, but  rather to draw attention to the failings of the LoveMyKidsToBits,Me mentality, failings which are overlooked in the current phony Leveson enquiry, failings which were bulldozed aside by the McCann PR team - Gerry and Cilla, you will recall, left a three year old alone in charge of two two year olds, in a strange room, in a strange town in a strange country whilst they went on the piss, not only did they manage to convince many that this was responsible parenting but they  also insisted that their neglect was actually the fault of the local  police. LoveMyKidsToBits,Me,  therefore I can do no wrong; how dare you, you lookin' fer a punch in the gob?

I have a nephew who is an insurance assessor - it is a dreadful irony, for his late father, a starker version of Mr Frank Gallagher in the soap opera noire, Shameless, was opposed to all forms of work, especially those of a financial, regulatory or usurious nature -   there are no accidents, insists his son, just varying degrees of contributory negligence.  I don't agree entirely with him but I understand the mindset, I am in it a lot of the time, myself;  people might call it mild paranoia but it's just an awareness that although shit happens it can be avoided, minimised,  the world is full of beasts, you gotta be careful. I remember, in a  Redditch hospital,  saying to a father of a couple of hours,  Congratulations, you do know, Dylan,  that there are people out there, right now, who would love to bugger your infant son. Talk about ashen-faced new parent.  I took him home and gave him some whisky, didn't labour the point, but I thought it worth making, for there are those people,  there are people who want to sexually assault infants, let alone young women like Milly Dowler.  And you see, even if you accept that the McCanns are otherwise blameless,  if they  had not left their daughter alone she would not have been abducted, if she was abducted,  there is simply no gainsaying that. Varying degrees of contributory negligence.

Milly Dowler's abduction is less clearcut, but the cops say there was no evidence of violent abduction and that, therefore, the possibility exists that she unknowingly made her killer's task easier than it would have been had she had it successfully drummed into her: don't talk to strange men, don't get into cars with strangers,  there is no gainsaying that, either. Varying degrees of contributory negligence.
But there is no such acceptance in modern Britain, no sense of what could I, might I, have done better.  And there is absolutely no longer a tradition of  fortitude and privacy in adversity;  the refrain, No Comment, is from a song long forgotten.

And despite their stated revulsion to the idea, the Dowlers are now, like the McCanns, public figures.  Where once the nation would have briefly felt for them before they re-engaged with their lives, making such accommodations as they were able, now it is as though they have won some Alternative X Factor or BigBrother, after which they are intermittently celebrated for something truly awful, something which would be better they - insofar as is possible - forgot.

And so we come to Leveson's cover up and the Dowlers' and the McCann's part in its grisly, self-defeating circus. The people who penetrated  Mr&Mrs Dowler's daughter's phone, so cruelly, incredibly raising their hopes that she was yet alive are known,  the same people who penetrated their own phones, violating their most grievous and special privacy are known and   their employers, Rebekka Shitemouth and James Murdoch, are known.  These people should all by now be in prison, serving substantial sentences. It is as simple as that. Bang 'em up. If they were, no-one in the filthy sewer of  skymadeupnewsandfilth  would ever again behave so badly. That would be all the enquiry that was required - a pre-sentence report on James Murdoch. And seven years jail.

But some of these people are friends, neighbours, confidantes, allies and  funders of the self-elected prime minister of the United Kingdom. And if they go, they will take him with them;  they will know enough murky stuff to finally sink the brief  and unlovely career of this gabshite, dunderhead jackanapes, mr shinyface.

 And Mr  and Mrs Dowler have accepted two million pounds from the criminals involved.  A drop in the ocean to the filthy old bastard,  Rupert Murdoch, but a fortune to them. Blood money, accepted from the organisation about which they now complain, money accepted from the same source as paid for the phone penetration.  Who, lawyer or normal, decent person, could seriously care a fuck about anything they now say;  these people,  the Dowlers, like the McCanns, turning tricks  for the teevee cameras, are whores of an entirely new species.

(The effect of all this, of course, among the disadvantaged is that when people like Karen, was it Karen or Sharon Matthews, up in Dewsbury, see Gerry and Cilla hosannahed and enriched for their contemptible  neglect  of young Madeleine well, they try it on, too,  I'll have some of that.  The result is that the effete, worthless commentariat, sub-humans like Kelvin McKenzie,  feel gleefully enabled to slander an entire community,  the same community which actually searched for and found the missing Matthews child.)

What should we call them,  these people, sprung from nowhere, feted for having lost someone, paid for each morbid appearance, gibbering away in the jargon of loss,  bleating about cloze-ya, as if any of them actually wanted cloze-ya ?  No,  Trusts, that's what they want setting up. And anniversary specials. And book deals.  And new laws, especially new laws. What they want is instant victims' justice, like in the good old days of the cavemen. But what they really want, more than anything,  is to be in front of the camera.  Like anybody really gives a fuck about them.

Child murder, abduction, military fatality.  There'll be another one along in a minute.



26 comments:

Dick the Prick said...

014654 765876 - where there's blame there be a fucking claim. How's this for laughs - turns out, no fuck interferred with young Milly's phone - just number of calls and limited RAM - haaa ha ha fucking ha. Phone someone who cares, maybe? 'You've reached the voicemail of go fuck yourself, please leave a message after....

Mike said...

Once some marketing genius identified kids as consumers - directly, and as levers on parents - then they were doomed. That, and since the cult of celebrity became the new religion, as you rightly point out, Mr I.

mongoose said...

As I understand it, Mr DtP, the voicemail box was full and the family could not leave any further entreaties for her to get in touch. One day, the mother rang and could leave a message. The inference she took was that maybe the kid had accessed her voicemail, deleted some, and was therefore maybe alive. This is sin enough surely?

Dick the Prick said...

@Monsieur Mongoose - dunno. I certainly think that is the charge, and if so if you wouldn't mind just popping yourself next to that wall, yup, that's fine - but, maybe not. It's like gradations of shite, what colour was it? Did you have a paper? Fucking hellski.

call me ishmael said...

It is more than sin enough. If I had done it, it would have been presented as perverting the course of justice, interfering with a police investigation, theft of intellectual property, whatever, a private individual would have had the book thrown at them but of course Sergeant Filth and his boys work for skymadeupnewsandfilth, too, all in it together, cunting fucking bastards.

Goes back, mr mike, to the creation of the teenager as a powerful economic unit despite having no money of its own, goes back to the days of Elvis Presley the famous, hip-swivelling paedophile.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps, like me, Mr Ishmael, you remember a time when personal dignity and the respect of neighbours were important factors in what is now called 'social cohesion'. It isn't necessarily a coincidence that those factors have diminished in a negative correlation with the intrusion of TeeVee into every little crevice of the psyche of the damned. It seems to have taken over from the community as arbiter of what is acceptable, which is paradoxical, perhaps, because the telly magnifies the sensational, whereas the community would often diminish it.

Woman on a Raft said...

If I had done it, it would have been presented as perverting the course of justice, interfering with a police investigation, theft of intellectual property, whatever, a private individual would have had the book thrown at them but of course Sergeant Filth and his boys work for skymadeupnewsandfilth, too, all in it together, cunting fucking bastards.


Other way round, Mr Ishmael.

The journalist told the cops at the time and they discounted the relevance to the investigation, the reason being 2 fold:

1) Journalists had worked up a relationship with the police. The deal is, the journalists pass on what the police have not got time to do for themselves and the police will not ask where the info came from. In this case, the journalist knew he was interfering with an investigation and so covered his arse good and early.

2) It's not just the papers. The police had given themselves permission outside of the current law, having decided that listening to someone's voicemail is not an intercept providing you don't delete anything. And you probably wouldn't because you don't want to alert the person to clock the fact that they are being listened to.

In practice, these two were powerful combined factors to discourage the police from initiating an investigation until absolutely forced to.

call me ishmael said...

Yes, thanks, that's very well put, mr edgar. I do remember, just about, a time when it mattered what the neighbours thought. And where neighbours might have said There-there, is there anything we can do to help, skymadeupnewsandilth says What can we do to make this situation immeasurably worse for you?

mongoose said...

But, Mrs WOAR, isn't that horrible, corrupt, conspiracy to something and vileness? And more? Don't answer that.

But do the police really - and often enough for it to count, not just the odd one swine - do they routinely utilise the Press like that, and just, fuck me, break the law to access stuff? Jeez, searchers after truth, eh? Even Gemma one day soon it seems. I have lived too long.

I suppose that is all just power and corruption. Petty power breeds petty corruption - everywhere, if the empowered is weak enough or the structure of conformance is srtong enough.

call me ishmael said...

Worse, even, than I thought, then, mrs woar, the two-way Street of Filth. I thought it sort-of stopped at Crimewatch; I remember that great detective Mr Call Nick Ross sagely and publicly pronouncing himself satisfied with the verdict, after his mates in the filth had fitted-up Barry George for the murder of Miss Dando, now long-forgotten, stalking Telly Bimbo Valhalla. Ross, the worthless piece of shit, was strangely silent when George was eventually released from his frame-up. Unspeakable, these fuckers on the telly, all of them.

Any thoughts on Lord Levo's flying, orchestral circus?

Dashed well-behaved, so far, I think. Needs a few Prithee Sirs and By your Lordship's leaves for it to be a truly great TeeVee Cover-Up but great minds will be at work at it, even now, as the common folk slumber abed.

Anonymous said...

The journalist who hacked into Milly Dowler's mobile phone was aiding and abetting a murderous paedophile. Same goes for any of his fellow scum in the News of the World who consciously knew about it at the time or any police officers who knew about it.

They are worse than Levi Bellfield, much worse, and should be facing at least similar sentencing (which should be death by hanging).

call me ishmael said...

For the second time of asking mr mongoose, who is Gemma? We should be told.

mongoose said...

Oh, do keep up, Mr I, I told you yesterday. Gemma is a Special and the girlfriend of my mate's offspring. 25 and ne'er taken a bung. Yet.

call me ishmael said...

Aside from for politicians to whom it woiuld be mist instructive, I am opposed to the death penalty, mr anonymous; I think that if we are concerned about preventing further assaults on and killings of children by such offenders we need to seriously re-examine and revise the ways in which we deal with those specimens who we actually hold in captivity and from whom we might learn the causes of and the tactics for preventing such crimes. There are, of course, many far worse offenders than Mr Bellfield - we could look, for instance, into the mysterious cover-up of the Dunblane Enquiry and we could look at the resistance of the Scottish media-political-justice system to even acknowledge, much less investigate the systematic abuse of Hollie Greig by high-ranking public officials, see CallMeIshmael passim. Similar scandals of prolonged officially sanctioned child sexual abuse exist in Northern Ireland; these are people who you could not hang but whose crimes in aggregate far outweigh those of your common or garden nonce. And then there is holy mother church (prop. Pope Nazi) they are fucking everywhere, locking a few of them up together in some nionce shithole wing of Wakefield Prison won't make any children safer and nor will hanging the odd one. I believe that future child safety is more important than satisfying a doubtless valid if visceral desire for neck-breaking, eye-popping, bowel-squirting revenge.

As to the hacks who penetrated the phones, I agree and refer you to my original post; they should have been in jail months ago, along with the first offender who handled a stolen bottle of water.

call me ishmael said...

Sorry, mr mongoose, your revelation must have blindsided me. It will all end in tears, you must know that. The axiom is not All Coppers Are Bastards Except Gemma, now, is it?

call me ishmael said...

ps Specials? They're the worst.

mongoose said...

I know but she is is trying to be a proper copper. Apparently it is the way it is done. I know not. I just listen.

But Gemma is yet the best of the worst. Irish-French-Canadian idealist... It is a terrible waste of a very gentle wee girl who wants to do "something". There is time yet. Let us hope that she escapes the Cowley Road drunk runs with her mind and honour intact.

call me ishmael said...

......And escapes having her bare buttock rubberstamped with "Police Property," just to show she's one of the lads, like.

I do like that version of Dignity, but even that is about twenty years old, not the sepulchral atonal groaning he currently serves up to the faithful. Or, as I drawled to myself recently, parodically, en pastiche :

Who cares what he says?
Who cares what he does?
He is what he is
But he ain't what he was.

mongoose said...

Yes, we know, I know, but she doesn't. Let us hope. There is also talk of their running away to Canada.

Just do it, kids. Flee, please.

call me ishmael said...

Canada does look good, if they can keep Uncle Sam at bay, I was there aas a boy runaway-to-sea.

a young Anglo-Irish catholic said...

Ah, yes the coopers. Did you see that the protection copper who was shagging Mrs Alan Johnson was chucked out of the force today?

Earlier this year I was discussing the antics of 'er-no-longer-indoors with no less a man than the Mail's Richard Kay, Diana's representative on earth.

When I mentioned herself's previous, and much denied, dalliance with the cockney 'intelligence' plod, Kay said 'oh yeah, its a game among the police, especially at the Palaces. They have a pop at the wives within the walls, seen as fringe benefit, innit?'

And yet these slebs whinge on about the press digging into their sleazy behaviour, yet they they court the press aggressively.

Was overhearing a Sun reporter today talking about the tactics of the sleb agents, brokering the best coverage and demanding sunshine up the arse.

It's well-known that Diana would call up and tip off the papers directly and her personal protection were making massive bungs by tipping off the paps as to her itinerary.

Why do you think drunken driver Henri Paul had some much in his account? Le Bungs for his tip-offs. After all, he was head of security knew where people were heading.

Shouldn't wonder that he hadn't tipped them off about the route he was taking Diana and Dodi. Ever seen the last shot of him taken from the front of the Merc?

Grinning like an idiot, with the passengers gawping out of the rear window.

It's all a massive game.

a young Anglo-Irish catholic said...

Here it is...

http://newprophecy.net/Diana_Trevor_Rees-Jones_Henri_Paul_1.jpg

call me ishmael said...

Yes an interesting photograph. But only what you'd expect from the entourage of somebody like mr al Fayed - a staff of crazy bastards, like himself.

I suppose life would be easier if we did just believe what we are told to believe about Kennedy, about Diana. It's just too hard to do so.

Anonymous said...

Every day I see a procession of these high-functioning sociopaths, crony bankers/corporate CEOs, westminster civil servants, lawyers, lobbyists, the media scum set, Mr I. If they are complicit in a common nonce crime why should they not face the same severity of penalty that is given to their low-functioning sociopathic cousins, the Levi Bellfields of this world. Since they function at a higher level, they have the capacity to control their impulses and to see ahead into the future. Wouldn't a sentence that recognised the harm they have caused without any of this "state of mind" bs have a more potent deterrent effect in their case? I wonder if your aversion to execution (and support for mild forms of execution for politicians) is because you are a kindly and gentle old man? Mind you, although I am a great believer in bloody vengeance, I would temper this if I could see how keeping these common offenders alive would help to protect kids.

call me ishmael said...

I am neither particularly old,mr anonymous, nor overly kind and in any event I have been horrified by judicial killing for as long as I can remember. But no matter, mine is not merely an emotional revulsion.

You propose an extreme version of Michael Howard's ( David Cameron's, actually ) nostrum, Prison Works - if people are in prison they cannot commit crime,apart from buying drugs and stuff from the Prison Officers Association. Similarly, if you hang one nonce he cannot nonce further but this will not deter other nonces for in many cases they simply cannot help themselves, in many cases they feel that they are the victim, that it is the child who is the predator, no amount of hanging other people will deter your whoreson nonce. I mean, lookm at the sentences they get, look at the treatment they get in prison from screws and other cons alike, Christ, they are treated nearly as savagely as the innocent men framed for the Birmingham pub bombings - who would've been hanged, incidentally, under your proposals. Better in my judgement to work extensively with those ninces we have apprehended in order to detect and prevent the very many more whom we have not. The choice is either bloody vengeance or an attempt to get to the bottom this shit - and only one of them will protect children.

Anonymous said...

I would never want to see a crazy system like the one that America uses with huge numbers of people in jail and an enormous industry built up around it.

The best thing is to have a society that functions without splitting up into a crazy caste system, an actual community of people who empathise with each other. I think that is what you are driving at, Mr I, and no doubt that is the best way to minimise criminal harm (to children also).

I get the point of course, that hanging has very little deterrent value for impulsive murders but my preference remains for capital punishment as a cathartic release. Of course, it's very sad when miscarriages of justice take place (a striking one was the fitting up and jailing of poor Stefan Kiszo) but I don't agree with, as I see it, your approach here of trying to abstract away misfortune and suffering from life. Namaste.