When a normal person expresses the desire to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger”, society tends to condemn him and he may well end up in some kind of psychiatric care. (Indeed, if he’s a Manchester schoolboy, he might end up in court.) But when that person happens to be a slightly pathetic middle-aged man called Adrian who goes by a pair of pretentious initials, then Rupert Murdoch pays him lots of money to write a newspaper column about it.
AA Gill is a cock. To shoot an animal through the lung for the purposes of “naughty fun” is plainly disturbing and not in the least bit entertaining. Gill seems to see himself as a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson; an intrepid gonzo journalist with a penchant for firearms and an appetite for illicit adventures involving red-blooded, macho tomfoolery. He is desperate to escape the truth, which is that he is a balding art school graduate (and former drunk) who has made a living by writing about whether or not some carrots have been satisfactorily boiled.
After the Jan Moir “thing”, Gill has proved beyond all reasonable doubt my recently expressed theory that all newspaper columnists are basically pricks. OK, maybe not all of them. Charlie Brooker is alright and there are arguably one or two others that aren’t that offensive. But, as a general rule, if you’re paid to express your opinions on the pages of something that used to be a tree, it’s pretty much certain that you’re an arsehole. (And yes, I’m aware there’s a fine line between writing a newspaper column and writing an opinionated blog post like this. But on the other hand, I’ve never shot a baboon.)
By the way, is it weird that I felt vastly more repulsed by Gill’s column than Moir’s? I only ask because I appear to be out of step with the mob. There are around a thousand articles on Google News relating to Moir’s indefensible Daily Mail-sponsored gay-bashing and 25,000 complaints have been filed to the PCC. Meanwhile Gill, who shot a defenceless animal in the chest for fun, has elicited less than 20 stories on Google News and, as far as I’m aware, no complaints to the PCC. There’s some kind of social lesson and/or bad joke buried here somewhere but I’m not sure I’ve got the energy to think about it.
The Conversation {1 comments}
I think Moir’s article was a lightning rod for a lot of what is plainly homophobic tripe from papers like the Mail, whereas I think Gill would have shot a baboon even if he didn’t intend to write about – someone told me he frequently goes shooting in Scotland, where he ‘couldn’t shoot a fish in a barrel’, apparently.
And can we really be sure you’ve never shot a baboon Dave? Can we really?
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