Cross-currents in the Anglosphere

An interesting day for Her Majesty's battalion of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. There's a zombie stalking warblogger columns across the land -- the task of finding just the right comparison between Dubya and a British statesman of old. Today, Andrew Sullivan presents Gladstone as the apt figure:

But Bush's Gladstonian big stick alone is also problematic ... It is therefore primarily a pragmatic decision we now face about which approach - Bush's Gladstone or Kerry's Disraeli ... (cont'd p94)*

Putting aside our inner Beavis and Butthead with one meaning of that first clause, it is nonetheless germane to note our own previously expressed view that about the only relevant point of comparison between Dubya and Gladstone is indeed wood: they both liked to smash it as relaxation.

And since, via Gladstone, we're talking about Ireland, Sullivan offers his own credentials in another War on Terror:

I lived through the era of "an acceptable level of terrorism" in Northern Ireland. I loathed it then and I loathe it now.

There they go again on the Northern Ireland -- al Qaeda comparisons. And it's a sentence that's a tad imprecise (he lived in England) but then again the whole point of blogging is not have an editor who'd catch such things so let's leave it there.

Now to Mark Steyn, who likewise has a cachet amongst the American Punditocracy along the lines of: he writes for British publications, so he must know about that terrorism stuff. Steyn revealed yesterday that the Daily Telegraph pulled his column that was due to run today. There are a couple of ways to interpret this. One is that the free pass at the Telegraph for all things Canadian has lapsed with the exit of Conrad Black. The other is that the text of the column itself did indeed sound like the makings of a severe headache for the Telegraph had it run.

Steyn has helpfully provided the offending column [note: replaced dead link]. We've read it several times and don't have a judgement on what it is about this particular Steyn column that tipped it over the edge. It's about the anguished reaction in Britain and in Liverpool in particular to the extended kidnapping and death of British (and right before he died, Irish) hostage Ken Bigley. Steyn zeroes in on the little we know about Bigley -- the little that conforms to an expat stereotype -- and makes it the basis of sustained criticism of Bigley's family, the UK government, and (depending on how one reads it) Bigley himself. Not brave enough in death, says our fearless keyboarder.

Part of Steyn's reputation is indeed for being provocative so the Telegraph won't have much credibility if they express surprise at this column. We suspect that the clincher for the editors in pulling this column was not even any of the above, but the sustained mockery of the city of the Liverpool:

THE QUALITY OF MERSEY... the entire city of Liverpool going into a week of Dianysian emotional masturbation over some deceased prodigal son with no inclination to return whom none of the massed ranks of weeping Scousers ...

Any Telegraph editor reading this (at least one actually familiar with recent English history) would had to have thought of the years-long boycott in Liverpool of the Sun for the way it covered the Hillsborough disaster; as with Steyn, tragedy and death were converted into a means to mock a city and its people. Perhaps Steyn, sitting in New Hampshire as he wrote the column, was unaware of this problem.

(*cont'd p94 usage stolen from Private Eye a la Mickey Kaus)