Ut oh.
It is never a happy thing to capture the attention of the Daily Mail.
The effigy burned at the bonfire every year — the Guy, as it were — is usually a satirical portrait of one of that year’s numero uno pains-in-the-ass. Burning the figure is a two-fingers-up to the pope or the prime minister or whoever got on local society’s collective tits that year. Rye goes one further and generally starts the bonfire by blowing up the guy with a grand, window-rattling boom.
This year, Rye Bonfire Society decided to do something else. Instead of an effigy, they made a large three-poppy display on the front of the bonfire, in commemoration of the WWI centenary. They didn’t blow it up, they burned it in what I imagine they thought of as a sort of grand and honorable Viking funeral.
Unfortunately, burning, snatching, crumpling and otherwise disrespecting poppies has become the Brit equivalent of flag burning, so the display hit some people wrong. They — the organizers — should have seen the likelihood it would be so.
Still, I am an unfan of the Mail, a shit-stirring rag. It’s pretty lousy to make a big deal of this; Rye is the last place that would deliberately disrespect the Great War. I’d hate to see ‘our side’ become as tetchy as the opposition about unintended slights.
Posted: November 12th, 2014 under britain, history, holidays, personal.
Comments: 9
Comments
Comment from Jeff Gauch
Time: November 13, 2014, 1:18 am
They should have gone with Kaiser Wilhelm.
Comment from drew458
Time: November 13, 2014, 3:09 am
Which online papers are the good ones then? I surf the UK sites to try and stay on top of news, and all of them look an awful lot like the National Enquirer. Given that England has 1)no self defense 2)gypos 3)islamo-loonies 4)Ratherham and other “grooming” scandals 5) crazy town councils 6) welfare deadbeats to beat the band 7) even your arch conservatives are Democrats IMO, etc … how do I tell the good papers from the bad, especially given that even the worst English hack writes at a higher intellectual level than our NY Times?
Comment from Sone Vegetable
Time: November 13, 2014, 4:17 am
World War I has always fascinated me in a terrified peek-though-your-fingers kind of way. Of course all wars are terrible, and death is never pretty, but WWI somehow turned horror up to 11 for me.
The battlefield where every inch was shelled until the mud was so deep the horses drowned; the poison gas, the rotting bodies,thousands of men running through the barbed wire towards the machine gun nests: the horror, the horror, the horror. and it went on for years
“In terms of casualties, 1 July 1916 was also the worst day in the history of the British Army, which had 60,000 casualties, mainly on the front between the Albert–Bapaume road and Gommecourt, where the attack failed disastrously and few British troops reached the German front line.”
We need to show some damn respect for the men who died in that War, for us.
Comment from Carl
Time: November 13, 2014, 10:43 am
drew458, the Daily Telegraph is one of the more reputable conservative newspapers.
The Daily Mail is the most widely read online newspaper in the world. It has more readers in the U.S.A. than in the U.K. It makes very entertaining reading, though many of its articles are ridiculous or trivial and it takes up an extreme position on some issues. It is anti BBC, anti NHS, anti local government. In the 1930s the Daily Mail was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and Mussolini. Its political stance has not changed much since then.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: November 13, 2014, 6:15 pm
Me too, Some Veg. WWI has always held a particular horror for me. Enough that I have avoided learning anything more about it than I have to. It’s little wonder writing from the aftermath is apocalypse-flavored.
It is with a heavy heart I report that the Telegraph has taken a recent lunge to the left. It was once my favorite newspaper, but it has declined steadily for years. Recently, they took on board a new (American) editor and they’ve been firing conservatives right and left. It’s a shell of the paper it used to be.
😮
Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: November 13, 2014, 7:42 pm
The Daily Telegraph is in free-fall. It’s a disaster – the UK’s only even nominally non-socialist newspaper is being turned into a poor shadow of the hateful Marxist rag, the Guardian.
And I’m with Some Veg and The Weasel. For some reason The Great War fills me with a dread I don’t feel about any of the others.
Comment from Bikeboy
Time: November 13, 2014, 8:25 pm
The Daily Mail has lots of good photos. (It would be even better with more photos of Taylor Swift, and fewer photos of the Kardashians. Ha!)
Comment from Mojo
Time: November 13, 2014, 8:32 pm
Better hire Piers Morgan to clean up their act, eh wot?…
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