It’s demonstrable that, though some lefties are also knaves, all are fools.
This doesn’t mean some of them can’t be superficially clever – many are. It’s just that if they were capable of any deeper thought, they wouldn’t be lefties.
Martin Bashir is a case in point. Mr Bashir, you may recall, was first sprinkled with star dust in 1995, when Princess Diana chose him for her cynical PR stunt… sorry, I mean her heart-rending, sainthood-conferring interview.
As she admitted her adultery, the princess’s eyelashes were flapping histrionically, which was supposed to make her look like a victim. Now a conscientious interviewer would have reminded her of the extant English law, according to which cuckolding the heir to the throne is high treason punishable by death.
But Diana had chosen her sounding board wisely. Every close-up of Bashir showed him nodding compassionate understanding with the frequency of a Parkinson’s sufferer.
That performance led to Bashir’s glittering career in America, first with ABC and then with MSNBC. It was from that job that he resigned two days ago following an outcry caused by his comments about Sarah Palin’s alleged stupidity.
By itself, questioning Mrs Palin’s mental prowess isn’t a sacking offence in the alphabet soup of US TV networks. It’s practically a necessary job qualification.
But MSNBC was in a sacking season. Just a few days earlier it had fired the actor Alec Baldwin from his chat show, following another public outcry. This was caused by the actor calling a particularly obnoxious paparazzo a ‘c***-s***ing faggot’ as Mr Baldwin was trying to swipe a dozen cameras away from his face.
When MSNBC didn’t show the same alacrity in sacking Bashir, the other half of the audience demanded that the gander be served with the same sauce as the goose. Bashir tearfully tendered his resignation.
Now what caused all this drama? Commenting on the calamitous US debt, Mrs Palin said, “It’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master.” The grammar is questionable but the economics is hard to fault.
Most of those promissory notes, £17 trillion worth and climbing, are indeed held by foreign investors and states. It’s natural to expect that at some point this may give them undue leverage over the United States, jeopardising the country’s independence – first economic, then political. Though this isn’t the only possible scenario, it’s a plausible one.
In the good leftie tradition Bashir didn’t question the substance of the argument. What caused his outburst was the use of the word ‘slavery’ as a simile. ‘Slavery’ in Bashir’s circles means only one thing: US black slavery in existence until 1863.
This can only be mentioned in the context of a retrospective apology and a promise to compensate the slaves’ descendants by affirmative action and welfare. Mrs Palin used it differently, which is a crime much worse in America than cuckolding the heir to the throne is in England.
Hence Bashir’s reaction: “Given her well-established reputation as a world-class idiot, it’s hardly surprising that she should choose to mention slavery in a way that is abominable to anyone who knows anything about its abominable history.”
Bashir then read abominable excerpts from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, an abominable eighteenth-century plantation overseer. The diary describes abominable brutality towards slaves, which included forcing faeces into their mouths.
“When Mrs Palin invokes slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance,” went Bashir’s scripted comment. “She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.”
In other words, he thinks that thus supplementing Mrs Palin’s diet would be a fitting punishment for using the word ‘slavery’ in a seemingly innocuous context. Never mind the denotation – the connotation reigns supreme.
Not having had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Palin, I’ll refrain from commenting on her intelligence or education. Nor shall I rebuke Mr Bashir for being nasty to her: she’s a politician after all. I shall, however, comment on Mr Bashir’s own intelligence and education, which on this evidence are both in short supply.
This may come as a surprise to him and most of his viewers, but slavery has existed for most of the 5,000 years of recorded history and – to the extent that there can be any significant history outside the United States – not just in America.
Yet slavery in, say, Hellenic and Christian times, specifically in America, are two different institutions. Christianity preaches the ultimate equality of all human beings. Therefore even nominally Christian slave owners had to believe that slaves were less than human, as proved by their being racially different.
Denials of the slaves’ humanity can be found in the writings of many Founders, especially those like Jefferson and Madison, who were themselves Southern slave owners. This, however, was a specifically American phenomenon, and revolting it was too.
Yet a slave in Greece or Rome was an institutional inferior of his owner, but a metaphysical equal. Usually the master and the slave were the same race, often the same nationality, and the status didn’t carry any particular stigma. It was common, for example, to sell oneself into slavery by way of declaring bankruptcy, and this form of bondage persevered throughout the Middle Ages.
Mr Bashir was clearly unaware of this when he offered his dietary regimen to Mrs Palin. Yet had he prevented his knee from jerking, he would have realised that she probably wasn’t suggesting that in a couple of generations Americans would be eating faeces in a cotton plantation.
She was clearly talking about slavery in its non-American sense, that of economic bondage. Interpreting it the Bashir way testifies only to his own ‘world-class idiocy’ and ‘rank ignorance’. But let’s not be harsh on the poor lad. He does have to make a living in the ‘liberal’ media.
P.S. Nelson Mandela still hasn’t risen, but I’ll keep you posted.