I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible.
I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible. I mean, next in line for the national outpouring of bile and contumely. My closest friend is an art therapist and his smugness is beginning to get my goat, especially coming from someone who wanders around loony bins at my expense with a bag of crayons and a head full of post-Freudian idiocies. So, 2012, remember, let’s take it out on the art therapists. I’ll start the Twitter campaign in November, you ring the Guardian.
For the moment, though, it’s journalists, and fair enough I suppose. Just as with the loathing poured upon the bankers, and then the politicians, the fury has its confected elements for sure, and it is given momentum by schadenfreude, spite and political opportunism, not to mention social networking sites. But there’s no doubting that the massed public revulsion is genuine enough and perhaps overdue. I felt, as we all rounded with glee upon the MPs two years ago, that sooner or later we would cop it, a feeling of foreboding compounded by my trade’s astonishingly sanctimonious outrage that we were having a privacy law imposed upon us by judges. The super-injunctions, as it turned out, were useless. But in those arguments marshalled every day in every national newspaper, the demands that we have a right to investigate who is shagging who and then to tell you all about it, in the public interest, in the service of fairness and openness, as part of a democracy and so on, repeated ad nauseam, our right to let you know that Jeremy Clarkson or someone from The Saturdays might be having marital difficulties — well, the hypocrisy stank.
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