For me, by no stretch of the imagination a paid up member of the sadly inflated Kill Kevin mob, the most disappointing aspect of the BBC Radio 2 lewd call affair has been that Kevin Myers should devote one full Irish Independent column to calling for the heads of Brand and Ross. I fail to understand this bout of Kevin Ires. Always an engaging writer who – good for him - has offended many in his day, surely his Malthusian suggestion last summer that we let the Africans starve rather than donate aid to them has much more serious consequences than anything the unfortunate Mr Sachs may have undergone. Kevin Myers who was once unceremoniously hounded for having referred to children born out of wedlock as ‘bastards’ should know to appraise the logic of burning the books of those who write unsavoury things. Like Niemoller, he might find that by the time they come for him there will be no one left to speak out.
There are enough censors world wide hunting down the word without artists leaping on the entourage of book burners seeking to destroy the offensive. Protection of the offensive is at the heart of secular culture without which we would be subject to even more dangerous forms of offence. Brand and Ross were wrong. That’s about the height of it. They didn’t gouge anybody’s eye out or slice their ear off.
In the same issue of the Irish Independent there was a news feature about a violent incident at a Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul heath centre in Dublin. In a very uncharitable act Michael Shadlow had his nose bitten off by a work colleague, whose testicles Shadlow had allegedly squeezed. The headline ran: ‘Nose was bitten off and spat into toilet, court was told.’ Sister Marian Hart who fortunately was on hand at the time of the nose biting incident said:
I realised Michael had a serious bite on his nose and that a piece of the nose was actually missing. I knew it would be imperative to get the piece and stick it back on. I found the piece in a nearby toilet bowl that had not been flushed.
The jolt to the mind of being hit with language so descriptive was more shocking than anything that I have read about the experience of Andrew Sachs. That type of vicious violence is what should be taxing our minds rather than fall outs between celebrities. Despite claims that the powerful are using their position in the media to torment the powerless a more purposeful way of assessing it is by asking how the lewd call incident could be ratcheted up into the stratosphere of news stories without really having much news value; and why, when real torment is experienced in working class communities, it often does not register on the news barometer.
All up, Russell Brand bragging on public radio about screwing a fellow professional’s granddaughter is of less concern than clerics screwing children.
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