Riffing Off the News

We spent this past Sunday morning engaged in our traditional routine of reading the Sunday papers.  As is my habit, I scanned the various sections hoping to find a news item I could turn into an article and, as has been the case since I moved here, put them each aside without having mined a single snippet of inspiration.

I find this frustrating.  In the States, newspapers were a major source of comic material, but here I come away baffled and slightly depressed (the news in Britain is universally awful—we’re rarely expected to make it past the end of the week).  After this most recent exercise, I had occasion (i.e. there was nothing pressing on my To-Do list) to ponder why my quest for humor in the Sunday papers produces nothing but disappointment.  The answer, I am chagrined to say, is startlingly simple: I don’t understand it.

Now maybe I’m becoming more simple-minded or the world is becoming more complex but my recollection of American newspapers is of easily comprehendible, black and white issues I could lift whole from the page and, like a clown with a tube-shaped balloon, fashion something comical out of it.  Here, issues seem drawn from an impressively expansive pallet of greys, off-whites and the occasional magnolia.

This week, I had hopes of running with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s gaffe about Britain needing to allow Islamic laws to run parallel with the British court system.  What a brilliant thing to say (comic-wise, that is); a mother lode of hilarity simply begging for the prospector’s pan.  The only problem was, he didn’t actually say that and, truth be told, I can’t be sure of what it was he did say.

For example:

"It is uncomfortably true that this introduces into our thinking about law what some would see as a 'market' element, a competition for loyalty as Shachar admits.  But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable."

It took people smarter than me to figure out what he was on about, and people smarter than them to comment intelligently on it, and it will take people smarter than the lot of them to fashion astute and witty articles out of it.  I mean, how do you riff off of  “…while not compromising or weakening the possibility of unqualified belief in the authority and universality of sharia…”?

I don't even know what he’s talking about, and who is this Sharia guy, anyway?

All of this could, however, be due to the newspapers I read.  Years ago, when the minutia of our new life was being forged, the question of which Sunday papers to buy, due to the fact that I was new to the country, fell to my wife.  Raised as a good Socialist, her criteria included thoughtful and balanced news coverage but neglected comic potential, so these papers tend to not be The Daily Mail, where, I am led to believe, issues are less complex and most social ills can be deftly blamed on having allowed so many immigrants into the country.  While the idea of being a Daily Mail reader holds a certain pleasing irony for me, my wife insists her family will disown us if we bring a copy into the house.

Now I’m not suggesting that the venerable Albany Times Union is on a par with a reactionary, right-wing rag or that Americans require their newspapers to play mummy for them and cut their news into bit-sized bits, I’m just saying the papers here confound me; make of that what you will.

Take the seemingly simple issue of forcing lay-abouts living in council houses to get off of benefit and find a job. You couldn’t, I was certain, come up with anything more clear-cut.  But as I read through the editorials, I found articles by people who, arguably, have contributed much to society and who pointed out that when they, themselves, started out—as writers or actors or any other artistic endeavor with a dubious pay check—such a law would have effectively ended their careers, consigning them to jobs involving hairnets and name tags.  People sucking the government tit are easy targets, but do I want really want to take pot-shots at budding artists?  (Note to self: Must stop being so liberal.)

I’m sure The Daily Mail managed to keep this issue from becoming all woolly around the edges.  They probably blamed the immigrants.