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David Warren

David Warren

  posted on Sunday, September 14, 2008
Bio/Email | David Warren Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

Why I’ll defend writers who represent everything I hate

I should like to defend Heather Mallick today, with both enthusiasm, and distaste. This defence is not strictly necessary, at the moment, as she is a writer with fanatic left-wing views, and therefore quite unlikely to be hauled before Canada’s various “human rights” kangaroo courts, or any of the other contemporary administrative tribunals that regulate public speech. For such institutions are themselves staffed by left-wing fanatics, and have thus consistently focused their ministrations on right-wing people—especially faithful Christians, but the occasional right-wing Jew.

Ms. Mallick is a reasonably well-known journalist, at least within the “Canadian club” of the mainstream media (MSM); an unlikely member of which I am, too. She was a little notorious at the Globe and Mail for the baiting tone of her effusions there, until she and the paper had a public and reportedly unpleasant separation. Then she was taken aboard the CBC, where she now writes a website column only a little wilder than what she wrote before.

I might not have noticed her column on Sarah Palin, last week, had it not been called to my attention by several dozen correspondents in the United States, and two in Canada—all of whom seemed irritated by it. Later I noticed discussion on sundry blogs, and even in the National Post: overwhelmingly unfavourable to Ms. Mallick. 

At this point, I hope my reader is wondering, “What did she say?” A bunch of things, though nothing breathtakingly original. Mrs Palin was depicted as a “toned-down porn actress” appealing to male Republican “sexual inadequates;” her daughter, Bristol, as a teen-mum “pramface;” her husband, Todd, as an abnormal parent, complacent in the “prodding of his daughter” by some redneck “ratboy.” Their son, Track, going off to war in Iraq, “appears terrified,” etc. The delegates to the Republican convention were characterized as “white trash”—“the demographic that sullies America’s name”—and as the ignorant stooges of “violently rich” men who “run the party.”

And so forth. Readers with a taste for still ruder remarks may consult that column itself, if CBC is still posting it when this column appears. If not, the title was, “A Mighty Wind blows through the Republican convention,” and it will be banked in the Internet somewhere.

A parallel column Ms. Mallick wrote for the Guardian Unlimited website in England made largely the same points, but more grimly and primly. I much preferred the CBC version.

Typical “conservatives,” my outraged correspondents were, to a man (and woman), careful to say they don’t want Ms. Mallick censored or prosecuted for writing such things, that she has “a right” to say what she pleases. They only contest her right to be paid by the Canadian taxpayer, through her gig at the CBC. Now, if I were the Generalissimo of Canada, the CBC would be the first billion dollars I’d save, but until that happy hour arrives, I only wish they’d publish Ms. Mallick’s scribblings more prominently.

Several reasons for this. The first, of course, is that by doing so, they will bring the day nearer when the CBC will be, ahem, “privatized.”

But my second reason is more generous. I think Ms. Mallick expresses openly what many, quite possibly most, of her MSM colleagues are actually thinking, and in my experience, actually saying in social gatherings and while working away from the microphones—though seldom with such ebullience. Ms. Mallick is rare in being so refreshingly candid, on the record.

Where such prejudices as hers exist, it is an advantage to everyone to have them expressed openly, discussed openly, demolished openly. Far worse is the poison in people who think like Ms. Mallick, but contain themselves within the shallow literary conventions of “journalistic objectivity.”

I actually enjoy reading Ms. Mallick’s blow-outs. I laugh out loud at many of her phrases and juxtapositions—the more, the farther they go “over the top”—and wince only when I think she has missed a good chance to shoot even higher.

Moreover, her assertions are often so malignantly unreasonable that one may extract some truth by reversing them. And her half-truths must necessarily contain some modest corn seed of reality. Laughter is an excellent guide: for truth is near, wherever there is spontaneous laughter.

Anger, on the other hand, makes one blind, and I regret that some of my correspondents became so outraged, that they missed the joy in reading such a screed.

“Hatred” and “racism” and “sexism” and “homophobia” and “Islamophobia” and “intolerance” and a few more ideologically twisted terms have been made into crimes in this country. People on the Right are being prosecuted now; those on the Left could as easily be prosecuted later under the same laws—as in Germany, when the Nazis used inherited, vaguely-written “hate speech” laws from the Weimar Republic to prosecute the very sort of people who wrote them.

To paraphrase an obscure interpreter of Voltaire: “I do not agree with what Heather Mallick says, but I will defend to the death her right to say it.”

Nice line, eh

...

David Warren is a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.  Visit his web site at davidwarrenonline.com.


Posted on 09/14/08 at 07:28 AM
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