Provocations

LITTLE ROCK — Word from the mother country is that still another British institution has given way to the zeal for political correctness. This time it’s the BBC, once the most respected—and trusted—source of news in the English-speaking world. And far beyond. But you wouldn’t recognize it these days. Except for its accent, the network that played its heroic part in the British empire’s Finest Hour has become largely indistinguishable from our own NPR with its decided tilt-to-port. No wonder NPR now carries BBC news programmes on a regular basis; they both share the same fashionable biases.

Perhaps saddest of all, the BBC shows little or no trace of either British reserve or the dry English sense of humor, both of which were once legendary. There’ll always be an England, people used to say. You don’t hear that much any more.

The old BBC, that last redoubt of the Queen’s English, disappeared decades ago, and RP (Received Pronunciation) went about the same time. Professor ’Enry ’Iggins of My Fair Lady fame would have been dismayed but not surprised. (“. . . use proper English, you’re regarded as a freak./ Why can’t the English,/ Why can’t the English learn to speak?”)

Here’s the latest sign of the decline and fall of the BBC: According to Dame Joan Bakewell, a Labour peeress who used to broadcast for the network, the BBC’s departing Director-General, Mark Thompson, nixed the idea of erecting a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC’s posh new headquarters at the top of Regent Street. Even though Orwell, né Eric Blair, worked for the BBC during the Second World Disaster—an experience that only reinforced his distaste for official propaganda, including his own.

According to Dame Bakewell, DBE, the idea of an Orwell statue was turned down because the writer was thought “too left-wing.” Huh? The author of The Road to Wigan Pier, Animal Farm, 1984, and numerous essays puncturing every left-wing bias in the book was too left-wing? The BBC’s esteemed director-general sounds not just autocratic but ignorant. Can he have read any of those books? Not to mention Orwell’s masterpiece about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia.

George Orwell was incorrigibly independent, a combination of Trotskyite zeal in his youth and Tory sensibility as he aged and learned better. Especially after having been chased out of Spain by the Communists, where he’d gone to fight by their side in that country’s disastrous civil war during the 1930s. Accusing him of leftwing bias sounds like a joke—except that the BBC lost its sense of humor long ago, along with its integrity.

This doesn’t mean putting up a statue of Orwell in front of the BBC is a good idea. Orwell, whose one consistent strain when it came to politics was a sense of English decency, and who gave the world the image of Big Brother in 1984, might be the last to encourage a cult of personality.

—————Have you noticed how the major focus of the discussion/debate about the terrorist attack that killed our diplomats in Benghazi has changed of late? How the blame is shifting from the murderers to the administration?

That murderous attack needs to be investigated and every aspect of it probed to find out just how this awful thing could have happened—so it won’t happen again—but fingerpointing won’t help clear up all the questions that still linger. Instead, it obscures who was really responsible for the loss of American life: the killers, not our fellow Americans.

Let the games begin and the presidential campaign continue unabated, but let’s keep the focus on how best to deal with a homicidal enemy, not the president’s failure to thwart this latest attack.

After the September 11th attacks, the secondguessing and partisan maneuvering pretty much destroyed the credibility of one president and commander-in-chief. Are we about to do the same to his successor?

At the risk of repeating a truism: United we stand, divided we fall.

—————Criticizing the economics of his Republican opposition, Barack Obama used some revealing language the other day: “They say the most important thing we have to do is reduce the deficit. Then the first thing they do is spend trillions of tax dollars for the wealthy.”

Just how did the president get the idea that Republicans want to “spend” trillions to help the rich? Because the GOP would extend the Bush tax cuts across the board, including those for high earners who might have the most money to invest in the economy and so help revive it.

This our president calls spending—as if the income being taxed weren’t other people’s but the government’s to “spend.” And so a tax cut amounts to a government expenditure.

Yet all his real government spending, aka economic stimulus, even though it hasn’t done much to stimulate the economy, has still not been enough to bring the unemployment rate down below 8 percent—though his hot-shot team of economic advisers told us it would. Pass the Obama stimulus package, we were told, and unemployment would drop to 5.4 percent. They had it down to the decimal point. What do you think went wrong? It was probably George W. Bush’s fault. Everything else is.

For that matter, why has this president’s whole tax-and-subsidize approach to the economy failed to produce a robust recovery? Here’s a hint from Margaret Thatcher, who had an English housewife’s sense of economy—and a storehouse of common sense in general. She put it like this back in 1976, when she dared oppose the Labour Party’s plans to keep nationalizing every industry in sight. The problem with such an approach, she warned, is that the spenders “always run out of other people’s money.”

—————Americans may still be debating the merits—and demerits—of the presidential candidates this election season, but Vladimir Putin, president of all the Russias, has made his endorsement. Tsar Vladimir, formerly Comrade Putin of the KGB, has pronounced Barack Obama “a very honest man.” And why wouldn’t the Soviet—excuse me, Russian—dictator have a good opinion of our president? Unaware that the mike was live, Barack Obama had told the then Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, that he would have “more flexibility” to deal with issues like missile defense once he’s safely re-elected. That is, more room to appease the Kremlin. Mr. Medvedev’s response? “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.” Evidently he did.

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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.