The debt we apparently all owe to the Greenham Common Wimmin

I used to feature a Nonsense column on this blog featuring written examples of left-liberal silliness. I recently got rid of it because I simply can’t bring myself to read the Guardian or the New Statesman or the Independent any longer. I’ve spent too much of my life listening to this sort of irrational rubbish to want to hear or read any more of it. But now and then I come across examples of world-class idiocy, which I feel it my duty to share with you (as I did recently with a spectacularly ridiculous article by Naomi Klein).

All I know about Sarah Dunant is that she used to front late-night culture shows on the BBC (often looking a trifle… distracted?) and that, amongst other things, she used to write supposedly hard-boiled detective fiction – I once heard her reading out one of her stories on the radio, and I would rather find myself naked on the concourse at Waterloo Station during the evening rush hour than ever again suffer the embarrassment of hearing an Englishwoman reading out tough-guy detective prose which she has written.

Two days ago, an article by Ms Dunant, entitled “A Point of View: the meaning of debt” was published in the News Magazine section of the BBC website. Here’s an extract:

When I look back over the political landscape of the last 30 years, the words Greenham Common come to mind. In my early 20s, though, I certainly didn't want American cruise missiles on my shores. I didn't have time - or maybe I was too ambitious and driven - to give up my job and go and live in a tent for six months in order to draw attention to it. 

I did, however, visit Greenham. My ears were ringing with snide jokes about hairy women and lesbian grandmothers (in the media's eyes, feminism was a dirty word even then). I was duly astonished by it - the collectivity, the humour, the energy, the intelligence and the power, the quiet - but determined - power of those women. I came back very clear that whatever happened at Greenham, I - we - were in their debt.

If you haven’t actually thrown up yet, here’s a bit about a visit to the illegal slum set up by the Occupy St Paul’s nincompoops:

What I found was a diverse mix of people, old and young, of all social classes, employed and unemployed, full time, or occasional, using forms of direct democracy (the tone and management of their meetings would put parliament to shame), lectures and conversation, to protest against the ways that the blind pursuit of growth and profit was corrupting our social and political systems and causing a dramatically increasing rift between haves and the have-nots. 

Two central messages have emerged from the Occupy movement around the world, and both have been used as a stick to beat it with. The first is that it does not offer direct solutions. 

The second that it refuses to promote leaders to speak for it. Instead, what it is saying is that we need an altogether deeper, bigger conversation than we have yet to manage about how we change the direction of the world in which we live, and that it is not interested in throwing up spokespeople who can become minted as instant personalities, paraded and then discarded when celebrity culture has got through with them. 

Far from being naive, I think these central planks are both culturally sophisticated and politically challenging.

I bet you do, you silly cow!

I realise that, because of my background, the Biased BBC blogsite (which offered a link to Sarah Dunant’s deranged wittering) is probably of more interest to me than it is to most people, but, if you haven’t paid a visit, I strongly recommend doing so – it’s almost invariably spot on.