O’Conall Street

I remember the day of the Omagh bomb like it was yesterday. I was the SDLP’s Director of Communications and Seamus Mallon was Shadow Deputy First Minister for just over a month. It had been a long summer. Drumcree was bad and the 12th of July in Belfast had been tense.

We took a last minute opportunity to go on a bargain basement fortnight to Tenerife to escape northern politics. It was one of those get yourself to Manchester for a middle of the night flights out. Fine when you are leaving but pretty awful on the way home. We got back to Belfast at about 9.00am on Saturday 15th August 1998. I was still asleep when my wife answered the phone just after 3.00pm. It was a BBC journalist in London asking had I got someone to react to a bomb in Omagh. He was panicked and wanted to speak with me immediately. When he told her there were seven dead she shouted into the bedroom. A minute later it was a local journalist saying reports were of ten dead but nothing was confirmed because the lines were down in Omagh. I was practiced in this type of media relations. A couple of years as SDLP press officer had served up more than enough shootings and other incidents, but this was on an altogether different scale. This was back to the dark days. Days I had hoped I would never see. Hard to believe we were organising concerts for a YES vote in the Referendum for the Good Friday Agreement with U2 just three months earlier.

I phoned John Hume, Seamus Mallon and the local MLA at the time  - Joe Byrne. Mallon, now in an office of state, had already received a call from officials and was getting ready to travel. He would be in Omagh by 5.00pm.

Seamus is one of the most literate men I know. He is a master of the English language and that afternoon, the sun beating down as he drove from Markethill, Co Armagh, he would have been preparing himself, choosing his words carefully, conscious that whatever he said would be broadcast far and wide as the words of the hopeful future for Northern Ireland delivered against the backdrop of a scene so reminiscent of its tragic past.

When Seamus emerged from the bomb site and stood to face the assembled media his first words were about a pram. He told the press he had seen a mangled pram in the wreckage of the road. He wondered about the little child being carried in it and the mother who was pushing it. To this day I don’t know the answer to his rhetorical question. Among the children that died that day were two little girls, Maura Monaghan (18 months) alongside her mum, Averil and her Mother, Mary and Brenda Devine (20 months). I must assume the pram belonged to one of them.

I have met the Omagh relatives on a number of occasions. They are a brave group. Despite the events of 1998 most remain deeply committed to the peace process and a new beginning for this island. Today they must feel betrayed and rejected by the hope of Good Friday 1998. They must also feel angry that a new beginning to policing has not brought justice to Omagh.

Sean Hoey walked free from court last December. 59 charges against him struck out. The police case fell apart like a house of cards. Low copy DNA has been discredited and ten years after the largest single atrocity on this island we are further from justice than ever.

I just wanted to note that fact on this tenth anniversary.

May they all be remembered.

In the concluding Irish Times article by senior Irish business figures on the best way out of the current economic blip, Denis O’Brien makes the case for greater state intervention in the housing market.

Calling for the expansion of the role of the Housing Finance Agency, Mr O’Brien says:

“The significant positive is that government debt is only 25 per cent of GDP. Therefore, the State has a huge capacity to play a most important role. I would advocate expanding the role of the Housing Finance Agency (HFA) and this could be overseen by the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). The HFA could be expanded and its criteria for funding home ownership dramatically changed. Effectively, right now, a bank looking to make a mortgage would want a margin of up to 250 basis points over Euribor (three months/4.9 per cent) to make a home loan. [Euribor, the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, is the rate at which euro interbank term deposits within the euro zone are offered by one prime bank to another prime.]

The HFA can raise money at a tenth of this margin. By reducing the cost of mortgages, then a lot of unsold housing stock becomes a lot more affordable to first-time buyers.

By reducing the cost of mortgages to circa 5 per cent to first-time buyers, this would, in turn, provide liquidity for developers and things would begin to move again, (albeit more slowly). It would also have a big impact on trade-up homes. It must be realised that the housing market is one market and that trading up and down are as important to the liquidity of the sector as the first-time buyer.

The crunch now is that with loan-to-value ratios retreating to 70 per cent, stamp duty will have to be overhauled as buyers have to fund more equity.”

An interesting suggestion from a man who would be perceived by many as an advocate of small government and free market economics. The rest of his piece is well worth a read.

Jay Cost on Real Clear Politics has a thought provoking piece on Obama’s messaging which is well worth a read if political communications is your thing. I don’t agree with everything he says but am very happy to reproduce the highlights of his post below.

On Obama’s Message , Jay Cost

Pundits have criticized the McCain campaign as disorganized, undisciplined, and directionless. These are valid critiques. His camp occasionally reminds one of the incoherent Dole, Gore, and Kerry campaigns.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is the opposite of this. He is the Felix Ungar to McCain’s Oscar Madison.

However, Obama’s organization is built around a politically risky meta-narrative.

A meta-narrative is just a campaign’s central message, the core claim that connects all of the campaign’s assertions. It communicates the candidate’s diagnosis of the country and his prescription for the future. Bill Clinton had a great one in 1992: generational change can invigorate a tired government and grow a sagging economy. Clinton’s outfit consistently reinforced this narrative. From the campaign theme, to the selection of Al Gore as running mate, to “It’s the economy, stupid” - it made sure people knew his core claim.

Obama’s narrative should be similar to Clinton’s. It’s tailor-made for a year like this and a man like Obama. But that is not the Obama campaign’s message. Its message often seems to be: this great man will unify a divided America around himself.

This is not entirely bad. A message of unity could be effective, even though it is tricky to sell in a partisan campaign. The trouble comes with the part about Obama himself. His campaign’s emphasis on his greatness is creating three political problems.

Navigate to BarackObama.com, and you’ll find this at the top of almost every page.
If Democrats are wondering why Republicans have taken to sarcastically calling Obama”The Messiah,” this is a good indication. On nearly every page, we are greeted with a picture of an illuminated Obama issuing a challenge from the clouds: if you believe this special man can change Washington, rally behind him.

This is a shaky foundation for a voting coalition. Most voters will be skeptical that Obama is so grand. So, why should they vote for him?

If he is going to issue a challenge to voters, it should be something like: if you don’t like George W. Bush and if you are upset about the economy, vote for Obama. Cue Fleetwood Mac. Drop balloons.

Obama is holding his nomination acceptance speech at Invesco Field, which can hold 75,000 spectators. This will divert attention from any practical political vision (assuming that he offers one) to the Obama-centered spectacle. This is what the pundits will emphasize, so he’s sure to get good buzz. People watching at home are likewise bound to be caught up by it, so he should also get a good bounce.

However, his campaign does not need buzz, or even a bounce. They call it a bounce because the numbers eventually come back down. The lasting value of a good nomination speech is that it frames the general election campaign on the candidate’s terms. By choosing such a venue, the Obama campaign will again frame the contest as one in which voters are asked to decide about the grandeur of Obama himself.

This is a poor way to frame a general election campaign. Everybody thinks the economy is lousy and a strong majority thinks George W. Bush has done a poor job, but not everybody thinks Obama is the greatest thing since sliced bread. To get to half-plus-one, he must persuade people who are resistant to this claim. He must frame this election in a way that appeals to them.

The second problem is that this narrative might be keeping him from doing things that winning Democrats have typically done. Strong Democratic candidates like FDR, Truman, Johnson, and Clinton made “average folks” feel like they were one of them. Each connected with average people in his own way, but each connected. Most of them could do this because they had typical backgrounds themselves. Obama doesn’t, but neither did Roosevelt (though of course Roosevelt’s background was quite different from Obama’s). And yet FDR could talk to average people better than anybody.

The common touch is not a trifling quality. Most voters are not policy experts, and they lack detailed political information. Yet they must still make a choice. In that situation, what should swing voters (i.e. those not guided by partisanship) do? It makes sense for them to vote for the guy with whom they can relate. That’s a candidate who can be trusted to do what the voters would want him to do.

Obama’snarrative seems to preclude this quality. The claim of greatness carries with it an implication of distance. If Obamais great, and the rest of us are average, how can we identify with Obama, or he with us?

Prior to Independence Day, Obama went to Independence, Missouri, home of Harry Truman. Good backdrop. Past Democrats might have given a speech here about how the essence of American independence is home ownership - but because of the “cronyism of George W. Bush, John McCain, and the Republicans, our independence is being threatened.”

Obamadid not give that speech. Instead, he gave a 3,500-word lecture on patriotism. The media loved it, but it had a problematic subtext. Lectures necessarily come witha presumption about the lecturer’s elevated standing on the subject. Thus, the speech fit with the above images because it implied that Obamapossesses some special gift - in this case, one that qualifies him to lecture the public about patriotism. This is not the way to develop a connection with the average voter. No candidate should ever lecture any voter on any subject for any reason.

The third problem is that it can diminish his greatest political strength - his rhetorical skill.

This was the conclusion of his June 3rd speech:

[G]enerations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.
I have read through this speech many times, and I am not entirely sure what “this moment” actually is.

Is it a broadly defined one, encompassing the entire campaign and the process of rejecting the policies of George W. Bush? That would be a pretty modest claim, casting Obama as the leader of a movement that is bigger than he.

Or, is it more narrow, referring to the point when the Democratic Party chose him over Hillary Clinton? That would be an extremely grandiose claim. The policy differences between Obama and Clinton were virtually nil, so the benefits of this moment would be produced by Obama’s unique personhood.

Honestly, I can’t tell which one he is on about.

Obamathanks his fellow Democrats in glowing terms, which makes me think that he understands he is just one of many who could have produced this moment. He also says that he is humble, which is consistent with the idea that this moment is not about him personally. But at other times, like when he thanks his supporters for listening to their hopes rather than their fears, he implies that he’s actually talking about the narrower moment. Then there is the venue itself, which was meant to give the sense that this particular evening was momentous. What’s more, June 3rd really was a momentous day in the primary battle. So, when he talks about this moment, it’s natural to think of June 3rd.

So, Obama’s role in the speech is ambiguous. Is he the imperfect vessel of the common good, or is he its personification?

This diminishes the speech’s effectiveness. It also makes me wonder what to expect in Denver. In light of the images depicted above, as well as the speech he gave in Independence - I think it is reasonable to believe that the June 3rd speech was ambiguous because his campaign is of two minds. It surely doesn’t want to create a cult of personality with Obama as the messiah. Nevertheless, it is depicting him in the clouds, it is selling art that portrays him as the fount of human progress, and somebody in the campaign created an ObamafiedGreat Seal that somebody else approved. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that his June 3rd speech straddled both viewpoints. Will the speech on August 28th do likewise?

Early in his candidacy, Obama’s narrative was very different. He was a candidate mobilizing the public into a social movement for the sake of the common good. This was a good message - but because of his campaign’s grandiose rhetoric and imagery, it has been displaced. Obama no longer seems like the mere mobilizer, working to unite people around the common good. Instead, he often seems like the point of the mobilization itself.

He should return to that initial narrative. I can think of three ways to do this.

First, remove the over-the-top stuff from the website.

Second, hire a speechwriter who appreciates Obama’s rhetorical style, but is not left breathless by him, and who knows what Democrats should say to swing voters. Obama is a good speaker, but his material needs to be crafted so as not to leave the impression that he thinks this is all about him.

Third, embark on an “Anytown, USA” bus tour where he can meet people on the street, visit struggling factories (making sure he doesn’t wear a suit), neighborhoods where dropping home values have been a problem, and places where gas prices have hit consumers especially hard. No big venues. Small stuff. Out in the open. Unscripted and organic.

Interstate 70 runs straight from Baltimore to Denver, running through a cross-section of the country. An I-70 bus tour might be a perfect venture for Obama. He could start at Fort McHenry in Baltimore (a great venue to launch the tour) and travel all the way to Denver, arriving right before his nomination speech. Along the way, he could stop to meet and greet his fellow citizens, just as George Washington did in 1789. If that isn’t enough, I’d note that I-70 actually runs right through Terre Haute, Indiana - the home of Evan Bayh!

It is Irish News day on O’Conall Street. Article below.

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The internet can be bad for business and all too many companies and individuals are ignoring their online reputation. Here in the North many take the view that negative internet campaigns are a problem only big multinationals have to contend with yet all summer the mother of all online attacks on an individual’s reputation has been unfolding on the local web.

It has been very interesting to track the reaction to Iris Robinson MP, MLA’s comments on gay people. Whilst there is a small but well organised lesbian and gay lobby in the North of Ireland, reaction has far exceeded their standing and social and digital media has enabled this.

A decade ago it would have been very difficult to keep a debate going for this long as the traditional media would not have been able to accommodate the diversity of views or such a widespread response. The media traditionally favour representative groups over individual opinion because programmes or newspapers simply do not have the time or the space to allow a conversation to happen in an unstructured fashion. This is why organised lobby groups get a much greater share of voice. They provide the traditional media with a single spokesperson, tipping what we call the share of voice in favour of coordinated campaigns and organised groups at the expense of the individual.

What is so different today?

Firstly the media has changed. All over the world the broadcast media has become more audience driven. The Nolan Show is a case in point. Producers and editors are surrendering more control to the listener and allowing the conversation to continue off air via websites. The same is happening with the print press where a story is now more widely debated through online comment forums. Finally blogging and social networks allow individuals to act and campaign without having to secure airtime or even be quoted in a news story.

For example, just after Mrs Robinson’s first remarks two gay men, John O’Doherty and Andrew Muir used the traditional media to publicise actions they proposed taking to hold Mrs Robinson to account. Both are politically active and would have some experience of the media and the means to get themselves on air.

Others have been doing their own thing outside the traditional media to considerable effect.

Over the past six weeks two Facebook group have been created calling for Mrs Robinson’s censure and resignation. Between them they have recruited ten thousand members. A petition has been launched on the 10 Downing Street website asking the Prime Minister to reprimand Mrs Robinson and has collected over 12,600 signatures at the time of writing. A Google blog search shows over 1400 separate posts on the issue in the past two months and there are 15 YouTube videos condemning the Stanford MP. Given internet penetration is now at a very high level you can be sure more people have read the online material then listened to or read the local papers.

So despite the conservative nature of northern society it appears social and digital media is becoming increasingly popular and campaigns are spontaneously igniting when an issue captures the public imagination or triggers indignation.

It will be interesting to see if this influences the Assembly’s response over in the autumn. 

Glasgow East will go down in Scottish political history and Gordon Brown is now facing right into the abyss. Margaret Curran was an excellent Labour candidate punished for her Prime Minister’s performance, not anything she did.

The Scottish Nationalists are exploiting devolution and their role as the chief national opposition from Scotland at the same time as being the government in Scotland. UUP take note.

Meanwhile the political stand off continues in Belfast. Gerry Kelly (Sinn Fein, Junior Minister) gave an interesting interview this morning citing a long list of devolved matters on which there is no agreement as a major reason for why the Executive is not meeting. This does not make sense. Surely the Executive is where debate takes place and consensus is reached about devolved matters.

Meantime the Utility Regulator tells us this morning that things will be bad this winter and others are rolling in behind him asking when the Executive is going to address this issue or the property crisis, or education or planning.

Makes you begin to wonder….

The good news this morning comes from the east. Obama did the business in style in Berlin yesterday. Patrick Corrigan has an interesting take on it this morning on his blog.

The news that the UUP and the Conservative Party are to reignite their old relationship is not I am afraid the minor political earthquake which top Tory blogger Iain Dale is describing it as.

Even after their fallout in the eighties over the Anglo Irish Agreement the parties remained sisters in Europe and soul buddies at Westminster. David Trimble was always a one nation Tory as have been the majority of UUP MPs ever elected to the commons. That Trimble (a Tory peer) is being touted as a prospective member of the shadow cabinet is hardly surprising.

Looking at it from an NI perspective it is hard to see what the UUP gains. It will not affect their Assembly presence nor will it assist in the reorganisation and rejuvenation of the party locally. Fact is the only people who can fix the UUP’s problems in NI are the UUP itself.

Things are different when you consider the implications for the Tories in Westminster. The next election could be a very tight run thing and having any number of UUP MP’s on board and ready to support the government can only be good news for Mr Cameron. He can claim to have a footprint in every corner of the UK, all be it a very small one in Scotland and Wales, becoming a truely one nation party again. What ever that means….

The UK is becoming increasingly regionalised and politics is less London centric than ever and the UK is less united than at any time since the Act of Union. You could argue that integration of political forces across the UK runs against the clear desire of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to enjoy greater autonomy and express their individual identities, social and economic priorities in a more powerful way.

Should the inevitable happen, and I believe their is an air of inevitability about all this, the one thing the UUP is going to have to watch out for are the conflicts of interest which will arise if the Tories are in government in London and the UUP are in the Executive in Belfast.

When an issue of difference arises who will they stand by?

Their Leader and Prime Minister or the people of Northern Ireland?

This is a problem the DUP are unlikely ever to have and all politics is, I am afraid, local.

Blogging councillors. What next?

Belfast’s latest young gun, the SDLP’s Cllr Niall Kelly (Balmoral DEA) has jumped into the blogosphere head first and to date his online musing are proving insightful and entertaining. I understand from Cllr N Kelly (the other being Cllr Bernie Kelly, also SDLP, also Balmoral DEA) that he intends uploading details of council business and regular news for constituents as well as his own general political commentary.

As a communications tool, blogging, digital and social media offer councillors a real opportunity to communicate in a time and cost effective manner with all their target audiences as well as allowing them to campaign on a broader range of issues online then they could ever do through traditional media.  

Check him out at BelfastStoop.com . He posted a fun Youtube video the other day on the US election which I am unashamedley uploading on O’Conall Street.  

I don’t want to moan today about the Power Sharing Executive which never meets or about the French President who came and left.

It may be summer but there is no evidence of the mood lightening in political terms on this island. In fact we are told today that Sinn Fein are willing to negotiate all summer to break the deadlock in the Executive and by Mr Adams that Ireland needs to negotiate all summer with Europe over what he describes and as the ‘dead’ Lisbon treaty. I am sure the government appreciate Mr Adam’s word of advice but am told there are more than a few TD’s believe the Sinn Fein’s priority should be the day job and the bread and butter in the North that need immediate attention.  

On a more summery theme, came across an interesting article last night about that other old chestnut, creationism. Slate.com has a piece by Christopher Hitchens about Salamanders and Creationism. It’s a great read and I have reproduced below for your intellectual enrichment.

It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct. To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth (which, by the way, contains photography of the natural world of a sort that redefines the art) and had come to the segment that deals with life underground. The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.

If you follow the continuing argument between the advocates of Darwin’s natural selection theory and the partisans of creationism or “intelligent design,” you will instantly see what I am driving at. The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones. How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility? The problem was best phrased by Darwin himself, in his essay “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication”:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

His defenders, such as Michael Shermer in his excellent book Why Darwin Matters, draw upon post-Darwinian scientific advances. They do not rely on what might be loosely called “blind chance”:

Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light …

Hold it right there, says Ann Coulter in her ridiculous book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. “The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? The interesting question is: How did the ‘light-sensitive cells’ come to exist in the first place?”

The salamanders of Planet Earth appear to this layman to furnish a possibly devastating answer to that question. Humans are almost programmed to think in terms of progress and of gradual yet upward curves, even when confronted with evidence that the past includes as many great dyings out of species as it does examples of the burgeoning of them. Thus even Shermer subconsciously talks of a “pathway” that implicitly stretches ahead. But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have?

Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be Coulter or her patrons at the creationist Discovery Institute. The most they can do is to intone that “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty. I wrote to professor Richard Dawkins to ask if I had stumbled on the outlines of a point, and he replied as follows:

Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don’t work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don’t think I have seen it written down before.

I recommend for further reading the chapter on eyes and the many different ways in which they are formed that is contained in Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable; also “The Blind Cave Fish’s Tale” in his Chaucerian collection The Ancestor’s Tale. I am not myself able to add anything about the formation of light cells, eyespots, and lenses, but I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble “red shift” that shows the universe’s rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: “Why will our brief ’something’ so soon be replaced with nothing?” It’s only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.

It is hard to believe that Iris Robinson MP, MLA, should find herself in the eye of the storm again but today, on the Nolan Show, she is reported as asserting that it was the ‘Government’s role to uphold God’s law’.

Iris is entitled to her beliefs and entitled to protection from persecution for what she believes in.  

The fact that she can make such statements on air is because we live in a liberal secular society. Secularism is the assertion that governmental practices or institutions should exist separately from religion or religious belief.

It asserts the right to be free from religious rule and teachings, and freedom from the government imposition of religion upon the people, within a state that is neutral on matters of belief, and gives no state privileges or subsidies to religions. It allows for the proper separation of Church and State.

This is not an anti religious principle. Quite the opposite. It asserts the freedom of religious belief and the right of churches to organise and promote their faith without interference or intimidation from the state or society.

The Government has an altogether different role and duty and that is to legislate for the freedom to follow all beliefs and none. I know where I stand on this issue. It will be interesting to see where the majority of people on this island stand. 

Great debate on the radio this morning about the now infamous front page of the current edition of the New Yorker. I am inclined to come down on the side of free speech although If I were in the Obama campaign I might feel this one could be far too easily exploited by opponents. You can appreciate that they will want to do everything possible to ensure the most electable democrat in a decade gets his cigar in November.

Kathleen Parker has a good piece on RealClearPolitics which is worth a read.  She argues that satire must be protected for free speech to be strengthened:

“The intent of the illustration should be clear to anyone attuned to current events. Cartoonist Barry Blitt was poking fun at all the rumors and fearsome phobias circulating about the Obamas among a certain contingent. We know who they are.

Viral e-mails claim, for instance, that Obama is a Muslim; that Obama was sworn into the Senate using a Koran instead of a Bible; that Obama isn’t a patriot because he refuses to wear a flag pin or put his hand over his heart during the national anthem; that Michelle Obama is militantly anti-American. And so on.

All these claims have been clarified and/or refuted for anyone curious enough to seek the truth. Even so, a certain percentage of people will continue to believe what they choose no matter what.

In any case, those about whom the outraged presumably are most concerned are: (1) unlikely to pick up a New Yorker; (2) unlikely to be swayed or disabused of their preconceptions. So what exactly are they worried about?

That yahoos just passing by a newsstand will see those images and have their paranoid suspicions confirmed?

Such is elitism at its most self-destructive. Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and former New Yorker staffer, put it nicely to the San Francisco Chronicle: “The essence of what they’re saying is, ‘I get it, but I don’t trust the people in Kansas to get it.’”

Sanitizing satire either to buffer the sensitivities of those who consider themselves more highly evolved — or to withhold kindling from those deemed less sophisticated — is all of a piece.

Ignorance is the common denominator.

While one strain of ignorance likely springs from misinformation or a lack of educated knowledge, the other is more virulent by virtue of its opposite circumstances”.

They are debating the new Belfast Logo on the radio as I speak. Reaction is generally positive.