Matthew Parris clearly thinks he’s being frightfully witty when he opens his latest column for The Times as follows:
A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists.
Oh, har-de-har-har. Highly amusing: some cyclists allegedly grubby-up his local country lane, so he incites random acts of violence. Sure people like Parris are paid to be opinionated and even raise a few hackles, but advocating injury and death—delivered randomly—as a punishment for littering goes way beyond the pale.
I don’t care how f•cking funny he thinks he’s being. He’s not. And I’m frankly astonished that a remark like that and the one about lynching a cyclist made it through the subbies—they must have had the B-team on duty for the Christmas holidays.
I’m not over-reacting here. This is not an imaginary crime—it really bloody happens, and the resulting injuries can be particularly gruesome:
Wire deathtrap injures cyclist (barbed wire in this case—a special Queensland touch there)
Two teens accused of performing prank that injures motorcyclist
Grand jury levies charges in terrorism of cyclists case (this bastard faced a maximum ten years in jail on each of two counts, but was sentenced to 600 hours of community service)
Mountain biker killed by possible booby trap (not a wire, but the same lunatic mindset)
And then Parris has the utter gall to end the last part of his column (on a different topic) as follows:
We walk about, wrote George Eliot, “well-wadded with stupidity”. We have to. But “if we had but keen vision and feeling . . . it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.
I find it hard to believe that this was written by the same person. Perhaps he should slim down his own wadding of stupidity and do a bit of work on his vision and feeling.
Other responses, all better than mine:
An excellent response by Dave Moulton
Phil at Sydney Cyclist
For effect only, Parris’s column rewritten with the word “cyclist” replaced by “homosexual”, at quickrelease.tv.
[via London Cycling Diary]
3 January
The Times has published an excellent response by Alison Steed.
4 January
Matthew Parris apologised in his 3 January column:
I offended many with my Christmas attack on cyclists. It was meant humorously but so many cyclists have taken it seriously that I plainly misjudged. I am sorry.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that most cyclists didn’t take it seriously—they were just concerned about the nutters out there who would take it seriously. And I’ve got so say that there is something incredibly incongruous in the phrase “Christmas attack”—a “season of goodwill attack”, if you will.
That said, despite the potential for harm that he has caused, I am satisfied that Mr Parris has recognised that his remarks were (at best) ill-judged and that he has made a public apology. There’s something rather refreshing about that these days.
Mind you, it would be nice if The Times annotated the original column to indicate that the author later regretted his statements or even removed the article entirely. And an apology from the editor wouldn’t go astray either.
Meanwhile the BBC reports that
A Press Complaints Commission (PCC) spokesman said: “We have probably had about 200 complaints about it and we are currently in the process of considering whether there are any issues under the code.”
He said that, based on last year’s figures, 200 protests would place the article among the commission’s three most complained-about stories.
The Daily Post puts the number of complaints at 270. That represents a lot of people not happy.
I sent him a fairly graphic and violent death threat a few days ago. I thought it was the least I could do under the circumstances.
Posted by SurlyDave | 1 January 2008, 10:34 amLet’s hope he took it in the right spirit then, because death threats are such a ‘jolly jape’, aren’t they?
Posted by Treadly and Me | 2 January 2008, 1:03 pmI sent something rather meaningful and polite. Understanding what violence can actually do doesn’t make me especially beholden to wishing similar. Upon anyone.
Parris clearly requires professional help. If you read his wiki entry he has been witness to horrifying violence. Poor bastard, and going against my ingrained yob tendencies, I actually feel pity for him.
Posted by Chris | 3 January 2008, 12:42 amWell I certainly don’t want any harm to come to him. I just want him to retract what he said and apologise.
Posted by Treadly and Me | 3 January 2008, 1:17 pmIt seems it was a joke! He has said sorry! So when another cyclist is hurt, seriously injured or killed, I’m sure that their family will say it has nothing to do with Mr Parris, the person who did it was only copying what Mr Parris said they should do, after all he said that hanging was good for cyclists.
The PC brigade will say they were misunderstood and the should be sent on a holiday to Holland where they can learn how cycle.
Yet more proof that idiots and politics go hand in hand.
[Note: This appears to be a different person to the Chris who commented on 3 January—T&M]
Posted by Chris | 4 January 2008, 7:47 amHmm, I was wondering how he’d respond in his next column, if at all. On the one hand it’s pretty lame but on the other I hardly expected sackcloth and ashes.
Posted by Treadly and Me | 4 January 2008, 10:05 am