So it seems that the British establishment is subsiding into the stinking quagmire that it has been built upon. They say that those who build their house on sand are foolish but those who build their house on a putrid bog of shit must be mentally handicapped. And the great problem with shit is that its stench penetrates and permeates further than anyone ever expects; so I would imagine that there are further skid marks waiting to emerge over the coming weeks.
Now this story has everything; deceit, cover ups, prime ministers, bent coppers, moguls, Chipping Norton and Hugh Grant. Such fertile ground for a good story has not been seen since Lee-Harvey Oswald sat in a book depository/grassy knoll/Langley Falls thinking things through. But what, with this Aristotelian plot– that even Dan Brown would struggle to fuck up- do the papers choose to call it? Hackgate or Hackinggate or something equally as mundane. Every journo in the country has predictably stuck the ubiquitous ‘gate’ to the end of any and every word they can. It’s like a badge of dishonour to make doubly sure that the reader knows they’re reading about a scandal. Thanks but no thanks. The way that those four little letters get crudely sown on to the end of innumerable headlines is the literary equivalent of the Human Centipede. ‘Gate’ should no more be attached to the end of words than your mouth should to another person’s scrumhole, just after they’ve had a lamb bhuna.
It was, of course, not ever thus. It was, as you will no doubt know, thanks to ol’ Dicky Nixon. Little did Dick think, as he stood defeated but defiant on those cabin steps, V signing away, that what many would remember him for would be the suffix ‘gate.’ Now, Nixon gets a lot of stick but I’m here to tell you that much of it is misdirected. Sure, he ordered people to break into a hotel; who cares? He covered it up to save himself; who gives a toss? People that worked for him were sent to jail; boohoo. Nobody died for gods sake. Hang on, forgot Vietnam. But still, the real crime, the true Luciferian malevolence was to unleash suffixial tedium on the entire world. It is said that we live in a post-modern, post-industrial, post-colonial society but I say that it’s time we lived in a post-Watergate one; where we are freed from these ‘gates’ that have trapped us in journalistic limbo for so long.
Now you might say that this is not such a terrible thing but you would of course be wrong. Adding gate to the end of words to express the scandalous nature of the story is just laziness, nothing more, nothing less. It breeds a creative lethargy that makes the world just that little bit less entertaining and that little bit more depressing every time. In this world of instant gratification and kebab flavoured pot noodles nothing is hard to come by, everything is easy and no one needs to try. But to try and to struggle is to create and invent, and without that we would be counted as beasts.
Pre Watergate, scandals were usually called affairs; see Profumo and Dreyfus. And that pleasing little word, which rolls over the tongue like pralines and cream, imbued every scandal with just a touch of poetry. And there, as the Bard himself says, is the rub. Today the poetic has been replaced by the prosaic.
But I will leave you with a couple of headlines from a newspaper that really did try very hard indeed, The Sport:
‘SHOOTS YOU, SIR’ (the day Gianni Versace was killed)
‘ALIENS TURNED MY SON INTO A FISH FINGER’ (On September 11…I forget the year)
Pure poetry,
A. Johnson
