WHEN the story about Swedish priests who were revolting against the newfangled custom of fathers’ giving their daughters away at weddings broke in the British press (6 September), I happened to be staying in a Swedish vicarage, with a woman who holds the rank of Major for her work as an army chaplain.
She told me that one of her most valued colleagues, a shaven-headed, tattooed biker, had been so irritated by the fuss that he had done his own research into what tradition demanded, and concluded that a properly traditional wedding required the priest to lead the bridegroom to the altar by the hand.
We speculated about how this would work if the priest were a woman, or even if the happy couple were lesbians. Then I went off to do my own research, and, while I could not find a reference to that particular custom, it seems well established that, after six hours’ drinking and feasting, a properly traditional priest would conduct the newly-weds to their bridal bed in front of an appreciative audience. Nowadays, of course, this part of the ceremony would be filmed for TikTok.
THIS brings me to The Washington Post, which had an illuminating article on the “feral 25-year-olds” who are running Kamala Harris’s social-media operation, and doing it so much better than the previous lot. “In 2016, a single Hillary Clinton tweet might have required 12 staffers and 10 drafts; today, many of Harris’s TikTok videos are conceived, created and posted in about half an hour.” It reminded me of the contrast between The Independent in 1988, which took three days to invent, commission, and start publishing a God-slot, and The Guardian in 2005, which took six months to set up an online section dealing with faith.
But what of the content of these online wars? Here is where the spirit of the tabloid press has taken root in all its raucous, entertaining disregard for truth: “Trump’s team has occasionally worked to mimic Harris’s online energy, but with darker memes. This week, Trump’s Truth Social account posted AI-generated images showing him saving cats from a crowd of dark-skinned men — a reference to the false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. In other images, cats hold up signs reading ‘Don’t Let Them Eat Us. Vote for Trump!’ and ‘Kamala Hates Me.’”
Meanwhile, the Harris accounts post clever cut-ups of old people yawning in the audience behind Mr Trump as he speaks at a rally, or an unforgettable clip of her being asked by an interviewer what her favourite curse word is, and replying that she can’t say it, but it starts with “m” and ends with “er” — then cuts to her apparently biting back the epithet as she refers to “that — the former president” in the debate, before cutting again to a clip of her laughing like a drain. All this selection and editing is done on their phones, because the federal government, of which Ms Harris is a part, is trying to ban TikTok altogether as a security threat, and it is forbidden to install the app on government-owned devices.
ALL this seems to leave no room for the traditional media. Yet we can still ask questions of our new alien overlords, as Henry Mance of the Financial Times did to a Google panjandrum, James Manyika, the “senior vice-president for research, technology and society”, no less.
What made the story was that Mance also put questions to Google’s AI:
“Before I met Manyika in July, I asked Gemini: ‘What is the top news in the Financial Times today?’ Gemini responded: ‘Several top news stories are featured in the Financial Times today (November 28, 2024)’ — sic. The response went on to list five headline stories, most of which seem to date from December 2023.
“‘But it also sends you to the site. We still provide links in Gemini, right?’ replies the executive. ‘In fact, although Gemini mentioned the FT website in its answer, it only provided two links — to rival news websites.’”
JOHN HARRIS, a Guardian columnist who describes himself as “a devout agnostic”, had a moving meditation on Nick Cave and the singer’s embrace of Christianity, which ended: “Most Sundays, I go walking with my two kids, which is a reliable emotional pick-me-up. More often than not, we stray into one of the village churches that tend to pepper our routes. It happened again last week, when we spent 15 silent minutes in a disused chapel near the Somerset village of Holcombe.”
He quotes Cave: “To my considerable surprise, I have found some of my truths in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird and thoroughly human institution of the Church,” and Harris continues: “Here, I think, lies the faint outline of a journey that more people may sooner or later take, and something I can just about imagine: slowly increasing numbers of people being pulled away from their screens, towards something much more human and nourishing. Those pews, in other words, may not stay empty forever.”