The definition of chutzpah: looking like this man and calling somebody else a hollow-eyed onanist. Bonus: Nick Cohen being tired and emotional at the Orwell Prize award ceremony last year — an oldie but goodie.
Articles with the Tag Nick Cohen
And so the great freakshow comes to an end … not quite
Over at the Prattle, Feòrag is busy tracking the inevitable Michael Jackson conspiracies, most of which think he faked his own death. More dead celebs have been accused of this, but there was a special kind of inevitability about this one. Jackson’s life story, his public persona and the constant media focus on how much a freak he supposedly is makes that he faked his own death halfway believable. Surely I’m not the only one who tought of that when they heard the news of his death?
It’s fitting that he died in the same way the poor guy had to live his life over the past four decades, in a media freakout. A child star in the early seventies, getting weird at the end of the decade, sleeping in his scarecrow costume from The Whiz, reinventing himself as the biggest selling pop artist ever, Off the Wall, Thriller, giving way to fresh excentricities: Bubbles, Neverland, hyperbaric oxygen chambers and all the other nonsense real or made up by the tabloids, but still canny enough to once again see where pop music was going and be there before it did, followed by more and nastier rumours about his private life, the unsuccesful marriage to the spawn of Presley, the accusations of kiddie fiddling, the lawsuits, the depts, the intended comeback and death. And now the endless speculating about how he died, who’s to blame, what will happen to his heritage, his kids, the feeding frenzy of tv news and tabloids finally faced with a story that they understand, none of that complex financial stuff, that dreary endless slog of more bad tidings about the economy, the environment, Iran… Then later there will be the anniversary specials, the tie-in books, biographies, tell all stories and so on undsoweiter ad infinitum.
Michael Jackson has been a background presence in my life for all my life, mostly an annoying one as I largely couldn’t stand his music and certainly didn’t need to have the Jackson freakshow shoved in my face all these years (and neither did he, I suspect). But only a complete ignoramus would deny his influence on pop music (step forward, Nick Cohen). He broke the colour ban on MTV and made it into the juggernaut it was in the eighties in those fabulous days when it still played music videos. If what he did with “Thriller” or “Bad” or “Beat it” (but never “Billie Jean”) looks corny now it’s because almost everything that came after it has build on his work. Zap through any pop-orientated music channel and half of what you see has been influenced by Jackson’s choreography or music. His influence is so pervasive that you don’t notice it consciouly unless you start looking for it. If Presley was the pop icon of the fifties and sixties, then Jackson was it in the eighties and nineties. To say that he “never was an important musician” is just foolish, but then the evidence that Nick Cohen is a fool is not exactly rare.
So Michael Jackson is dead but the show will go on. That a parasite like Cohen feels the need to attack the media coverage of his dead in service of yet another tawdry blogpost about the elitist ivory tower BBC/media is the best evidence for this…
Excusing police murders
An old and noble tradition amongst the Law’nOrder set, where the shooting of a Brazilian electrician on the way to work or IRish looking guy on his way back from the pub carrying a tableleg in his bag is excused on the grounds that their murderers though they were a suicide bomber, or were carrying a sawnoff shotgun and besides, don’t you know how hard their job is? Case in point, little Nicky Cohen’s column in The Evening Standard, as excerpted by Aaronovitch Watch:
In the hubbub a simple point is being lost. I don’t want to defend the Met’s mistakes but it is blindingly obvious that when the police think they are confronting suicide bombers they will shoot first and ask questions later.If they didn’t, and a terrorist detonated a bomb on the Tube, they would be denounced by the very people who are shouting loudest about the death of poor Mr de Menezes.
He also mumbles something about how the left was pleased to see De Menezes killed, so they had something to blame the police for, a standard Cohen projection, as witnessed by his own delight at the 7/7 bombings and how that showed up the left. Disgusting as that is, it isn’t new. More interesting is that belief that the police should be allowed to kill people as long as the cops sincerily believe that they’re bad people. Surely that’s just a licence to kill, as the cops can always gin up some story to justify their actions. (Or to smear their victims, as happened to de Menezes, but also to the suspects in the Forest Gate affair.)
Cohen wants to argue that the system works because there’s now an inquest into the de Menezes murder, but as I said earlier, this was explicitely set up not to assign blame, while the Crown Prosecution Services had already decided earlier to not do their job, after being blackmailed with massive police walkouts if they had. Instead there was an absurdistic health and safety prosecution agains the Metroplotian Police as a whole. No real incentive not to murder somebody there: nobody prosecuted, no careers cut short by this mistake, just a court order to one arm of the state to pay a fine to another arm. And Cohen thinks this is evidence that he’s living “in a country that takes breaches of its rules so seriously”? If so, do I have a bridge to sell him…
Disgusting as it is, Cohen’s bilge does accurately state the gut reflex of a lot of voters, “decenthardworkingfamilies” who like to believe they will never be the victim of police brutality themselves, but think that it is necessary to protect them, even if the occasional unfortunate accident happens. And even then the victims must’ve done something wrong to deserve it…