IT IS an interesting example of the power of the media to fix
things into a timeless past by repeating the same stories and
images over and over that I could not believe the
Woolwich murder happened last week, when I sat down to write
this. I have read and seen so much about it that it seems to have
been something that has always happened, like the past in 1984.
After 72 hours of bombardment with chunks of rolling news, your
mind looks like the surface of the moon, covered in impact craters,
and empty of life.
What gave the Woolwich murder its fame and penetrative power
were, of course, the mobile phones of the passers-by. All of the
coverage was filmed on them, and, without the pictures, the
immediate bloody horror would never have had the impact that it
had. But the phones themselves were not enough. Their message was
amplified by the television, and then set in its canonical form by
the front pages of the newspapers the following day. Almost all
used the same image of a man with blood all over his hands and
wrists, holding a cleaver that was entirely covered in more
blood.
The Guardian's caption was disgraceful: "No one is
safe." I know that that is what the man said, but it was not
remotely true, and the only reason for printing it was to sell the
paper by appealing to vague fear. Not even the Mail ran
that particular quote on the front, while the Daily
Express set everything in proportion by using one third of the
page to show a picture of the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge wearing
a yellow dress. The news story justifying this was that the Duchess
is pregnant, and had that day worn a yellow dress.
After this barrage of upsetting images in the media, it was
shameless of the Home Secretary, Theresa May, to propose still
further legislation banning "preachers of hate". We have perfectly
good laws against inciting racial and religious hatred. Sometimes,
that is what the news does, too. At a time when all the newspapers
are facing financial ruin in the medium term, none is going to pull
back from sensationalism just to improve the atmosphere of public
discourse a little.
Yet, without all this news coverage, would there have been a
huge upsurge in attacks on mosques, and reports from all over the
country of Muslims afraid to go out at night? The only thing to
hope for is that, if anyone is imprisoned for being a dangerous
fanatic under Mrs May's regime, he or she turns out to have similar
literary gifts to that other treasonous fanatic justly imprisoned
for his seditious ideas, John Bunyan.
One of the rules of televised horrors is that if anyone behaves
with heroism, we can expect within 24 hours someone to explain that
this is a result of their theological beliefs (which, by
coincidence, the observer shares) and their adherents' exemplary
quality, natural affinity with heroism, and innate tendency to
modesty. This happened with the Oklahoma typhoon, when an atheist
teacher saved the lives of some of her charges.
At Woolwich, it turned out that Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, the woman
who talked calmly to one of the suspects, was a Roman Catholic.
Sarah Rainey, in the Telegraph, got the quote: "Around her
neck, she wears a small gold cross, encrusted with rubies and
diamonds. She is a practising Catholic and partly credits her faith
for how she acted. 'I live my life as a Christian,' she explains.
'I believe in thinking about others and loving thy neighbour. We
all have a duty to look after each other. A whole group of people
walking towards those guys would have found it easy to take those
weapons out of their hands. But me, on my own, I couldn't'."
Her son, meanwhile, started a Twitter campaign expressing his
feelings in a less pious way, with the hashtag
"#MyMumisaMother-------Badass". But that behaviour is also fairly
typical of the children of believers.
And then, sure as night follows day, up popped A. C. Grayling in
The Independent with the inverse of the argument: the
villainy of the villains proves that he was right all along: "In
fact, the relentless drip of bad news about religion-prompted
violence in the world shows that the more zealous people are in
their religious beliefs, the more likely they are to behave in
non-rational, antisocial or violent ways."
I don't know whether to be shocked by the falsity of this
argument - how much non-violence of any sort makes news? - or to
admire the elegance with which he leaves himself an escape hole in
"non-rational", since, by Professor Grayling's definition, all
religious belief is non-rational. So, of course, any religious
believer in the news shows how religion makes people behave
irrationally. And these are the atheists who mock believers for
their trust in reassuring rituals.