Two examples, and they both have to do with newspaper journalists. Perhaps that's because their well-shaped words keep hitting those who don't like it that helps provoke the vitriolic response. H.L. Mencken's "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" dictum.
The first appears via a circuitous Tweet from Australia (@lifeasinzy) that basically is spun off from the event of a veteran reporter resigning (not sacked, but suspended, then resigning) from the Sydney Morning Herald, It seems a reporter named Michael Carlton, likely loved by many, and hated by the same number, but different people, has resigned from the paper after being confronted with suspension because of the four-letter responses he gave back to readers who recently wrote in about something he wrote.
Without knowing too much, we get the picture. Mr. Carlton stirs the pot, and when a group of people recently got mad at it he responded with a word that Richard Burton once claimed was the best Anglo-Saxon word in the dictionary. This isn't a family blog, but nonetheless the word rhymes with 'truck.' Good-bye Mike, apparently.
But not of course without some readers getting in their licks. Apparently one wrote in that Mr. Carlton was "a funnel-web in the underpants of good journalism."
There's a lot going on with that image. First, that journalism wears underwear. I thought it was "the naked truth." Perhaps because it's winter Down Under right now and they are wearing underwear to the office these days.
Then there's "funnel-web." Completely unfamiliar with the term. You get the idea it can't be a good thing to wish on someone because they're hoping it's in their underwear. Sort of like starch. Or ants.
Turns out "funnel-web" is a web spun by the funnel spider, a nasty looking, and if the right species, a highly poisonous spider. Certainly one you'd wish on an enemy. Having spider webs in your underwear has to be uncomfortable. It also means you should change more often.
Then there's the obituary for Chapman Pincher, a British journalist who has passed away at 100. The picture used in the obituary, seen above, gives you the feeling he was a shadowy guy. Replace his picture for John le Carre's on the dust jacket, and no one would be the wiser.
Never heard of him, but that doesn't mean anything. As a kid I used to sometime stare at the Manhattan phone book we kept at the flower shop and think that there are a great number of people in the book who I don't know. And of course, that's just the ones with listed numbers. Throw in the land across the pond, and it's understandable why I never heard of Mr. Pincher.
But of course I've heard of the type of reporter he was. Apparently he also afflicted the comfortable and came up with highly placed scoops on government doings, not all of which were appreciated.
He revealed details about the atomic bomb and traitors, British and others, notably breaking the story about the "Cambridge Five" and its most well known participant, Kim Philby.
His contacts within MI5 and MI6, the British intelligence bureaus, were so close to him that a British historian, E.P. Thompson wrote that Mr. Pincher was somewhat of "a kind of official urinal where high officials of MI5 and MI6 stand side by side patiently leaking." Mr. Pincher is said to have considered that the best compliment he ever received. It certainly leaves me with a new image when I hear about 'Wikileaks.'
The last word part in Mr. Martin's NYT obituary of Mr. Pincher is very close in spirit to that of Mr. Gore Vidal's, another afflicter of the comfortable, who gave us verbal jousts with William F. Buckley, Jr. that could have been pay-per-view boxing matches and nearly did turn to fisticuffs.
Mr. Vidal passed away in 2012 at 86, not quite 100, but certainly well past the finish line of his enemies. He said of his life it, was "such fun, such fun."
The last word for Mr. Pincher goes "oh, it was quite wonderful, quite wonderful."
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