Phrases to go down in history

A question for any journalist colleagues who read this: Have you ever uttered a question you immediately regretted? Many of mine revolve around speaking to grieving or upset sources by phone from within the newsroom. "How are you doing?" is a typically tactless comment I occasionally, and regrettably, employ. Anyone have their own examples? Email me or post.

Let's hope though, that none of us ever utters something like this (taken from the frontline club's event listing page):

Inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Edward [Behr] went on to write his best-selling memoirs, which became the foreign correspondents’ primer, Anybody Here Been Raped And Speaks English? The title was inspired by a request from a BBC camera crew he allegedly overheard whilst covering fighting in the Congo in 1961.

Celebrity and Class in the United Kingdom

If there's one thing I despise more than class and caste prejudice, it is unabashed and undeserved worship of celebrity. My distaste for such actions applies more to political and social celebrities than sports heroes, but even then, I merely aim to, as Christopher Hitchens once said, have comments judged on their own merit and not on the merit of those who have spoken them.

With that in mind, its worth noting that London is having a mayoral election on May 1, 2008, and that only two candidates have any hope of winning. The incumbent is Ken Livingstone, a "red" bully known for his bluster and almost incomprehensible levels of corruption (see the Evening Standard on any given day for ample evidence); and the challenger is Boris Johnson, a thuggish buffoon who once collaborated with a convicted fraudster to have a News of the World reporter beaten up by hired goons, according to the Sunday Times.

The whole point of this post is that I have finally come across an interesting opinion piece in the Times that summarizes these two detestable British attributes: class discrimination and celebrity worship; this writer argues that Boris's success despite so many failings exemplifies both (Boris being a pompous Oxford clown and a media quizshow pundit).

So I leave you with this:

Then there is Boris Johnson. The gaiety of nations I understand, but the most entertaining thing about Johnson is when he puts on his serious, solicitous look. Like David Cameron, he is coming to believe in his own sincerity. Servility to celebrity has partially replaced class deference, and the adoring polls suggest that Johnson benefits from both. A Greek grocer I knew put his finger on it. Musing about how Alan Clark imagined relieving himself on the public from his ministerial balcony, he concluded: “The English don't mind being pissed on, so long as it's from a great height.”[Emphasis added]

Of Men and Marlows

Last week I left the white cliffs of Dover behind me and sailed toward France, our boat chugging out into the English Channel as efficiently as the teenagers on-deck were funneling down cheap lager in anticipation of the England vs. France game in Paris the next day.



My companion -- one Josh Clipperton -- and myself reclined and watched the hooligans scuttle around the boat, racing each other red-faced and wheezing, while we examined the distance between Calais and Dover. It was, we estimated, not terribly far for any invasion force, which explains why the British sunk the French fleet out of precaution during the Second World War.

Our minds were so war-focused because of our mission: to seek out the resting places of our great-grandfathers, both of whom died during the First World War. Josh's mission was more of a pilgrimage, since various members of his family had already paid their respects. Mine was sort of improvised, brought about at the last minute by some quick typing and the discovery that my great-grandfather -- about whom I knew nothing, except that he died in the war, and that my own grandfather never met him -- had his name inscribed on the memorial to the missing at Thiepval. His G-GF fought for the Canadians; mine for the British.

After arriving in France, renting a Citroen, and buying ample supplies of bread, cheese, and wine, we set off across northern France. We found the grave Josh was seeking after a prolonged period of being lost, and then made our way further north to Lille, where we stayed the night. We dined in style at some cheese-oriented restaurant (delightful) and were quizzed by a lonely Frenchman from the south. One of his questions was "Did Canada fight in the First World War?"

Thus armed with the profound realization that war is ultimately futile and that the efforts of our forebears were capable of being utterly forgotten, we headed toward Vimy Ridge -- that ever so famous piece of elevated grass where Canada is said to have become a nation. The memorial was pretty moving. Privately, I felt as if the lily-white, high art-edness of it all sanitized the brutality; but the innumerable carved names of men much better than I silenced my forked, cynical tongue.



The most remarkable thing about Vimy, I thought, wasn't the memorial. It was the fact that after some 90-odd years, the ground is still unsafe to walk on; the grass and copses of trees have grown over the pockmarked ground, but still it erupts. This, and the fact that the countryside surrounding all of the memorials is still the same as it was in 1914, added an eerie background noise to the whole journey. Occasionally, I thought of Afghanistan, and how much blood and conflict its dusty soils has been forced to soak up.

Later in the Afternoon we drove south, towards and past Arras, to see the Thiepval Memorial, where my great-grandfather's name is carved. The Somme was and is synonymous with human carnage, where generals earned their nicknames as meat-grinders and butchers.



Sir Douglas Haig, that ignorant man who presumed a horse could canter into a German machine gun nest and maintain its place in modern warfare beside a tank, "butchered the flower of British youth in the Somme and Flanders without winning a single victory" according to a biographer of MacArthur.

My great-grandfather died at the Somme. I have not done any research to figure out where the Rifle Brigade, of which he was a part, actually fought, but his inscription -- like the 72,000 + names that surround his own -- is for those who were not offered the dignity of a grave. What this means, in macho war speak, is that he was never found: blown apart, buried under the mud, rotted, disintegrated, etc. That, or he simply died in No Man's Land when it was too dangerous to retrieve his body.



I know remarkably little about him or the circumstances in which he died. And I was the first person in my family to see his inscription on the memorial.



When I saw it, I felt melancholy. It was only when my eyes refocused on the names surrounding his, row upon row, column upon column, that I felt true sadness. It grew deeper and more intense when I thought about my own grandfather, who I had the privilege and joy to know. My grandfather was named after his father: Ernest Marlow, hence the "Marlow E." on the Thiepval wall. Before we even walked up to the memorial, we sat on a grassy hill and feasted, offering a toast to my grandfather's memory.

Having seen the memorial, and reflected, we decided to drive into Paris. We slept in the car that night after wandering the streets.