Heart of a Punk Soul of a Rasta

Fergal Keane
&
The Lovers of Outrage

I know almost nothing about Syria, or about the people of Syria come to mention it. I can confidently predict that all I know about the day to day aspirations and motivations of the Syrian people could be written on the head of a pin. But perhaps when it comes to Syria little or nothing is all I need to know. I watch the disperate pictures of the Syrian Struggle / Uprising on the TV, I see human suffering and waste and I acknowledge it but that is all.

This week I watched a report from Syria by "the BBC's" Fergal Keane. His report focussed on how the Syrian Security forces were deliberately targeting children in their attempt to quash the insurrection in the country. Fergal Keane's report was pointedly outrageous and constructed largely from adding two and two together to make it what he will. So whether his premise was true or not I couldn't decide. Maybe what he was purporting was so grotesque that my left wing middle class cosseted Christian upbringing meant I just didn't want to believe it. Either way, he did his utmost to make every supposition seem like the absolute truth; and anyway there is no denying the fact that children are being killed in Syria today.

But whether Fergal could prove State sponsored murder in Syria was not what was troubling me. There was something else I couldn't quite reconcile. What did Fergal want us to do, sitting here in our safe European Homes, with the outrageous information he was conveying? Did he simply want us to be OUTRAGED? Outraged in a vacuum. Or did Fergal want his report to
cause an effect?

Was it supposed to wake us from our slumbers in front of the idiot box and make us spring into action? If so, to do what? It wasn't like a natural disaster there was no number for us to call. Was our engineered outrage simply meant to put own day to day preoccupations into perspective? Or did he want us to storm the Syrian embassy in London and put "them" all to the sword? Or were we supposed to immediately write to our MP requesting a nuclear strike on Syria. Perhaps Fergal just wanted us to write a note on his blog page? Or did he want us to rise up on mass, form a militia, sweep across the globe and advance crusade like on Damascus? You see I don't know what Fergal wanted us to do with our outrage, because he didn't say.

Perhaps I've gone overboard here; perhaps Keane simply wanted to convey what he had gleaned and nothing more. Perhaps he was just doing his job. Perhaps he was doing what journalists do; desperately filling dead time in an age of 24 hour news clamour. But here I must stop because of course I'm being disingenuous. I know exactly what Fergal Keane & the BBC were doing with this report. They were wallowing and revelling in their love of outrage.

Since 9/11 the LOVE of OUTRAGE has become the new currency of the British journalist. Death and War aren't quite enough anymore for these new LOVERS OF OUTRAGE. The hideousness of WAR has to be twisted and manipulated and squeezed, it has to be more graphic more salacious more debauched more outrageous. The fact that innocents WILL be killed in WAR is not enough for them, it must be reported that Children are implicitly the main target; whether it is truth or not. And as I become desensitised by the constant ratcheting up of salaciousness by the LOVERS of OUTRAGE I start to wonder to myself. Who do I understand the least? The perpetrators of OUTRAGE, or the LOVERS of OUTRAGE?

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