Free Toilet paper, the Daily Mail

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Monday February 06, 2006 19:46 by Organise

So the Daily Mail enters the seedy underground of tabloid infotainment, a tragic day shared by many i do not doubt. A chilling mix of US republicanism and a belief that Thatcher and the Torries were not Right wing enough. 'ASYLUM' You Have A Right To Worry was a recent headline. For a time in the early 1930s its editor and journalists if we can call them that were sympathetic to some degree with Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. The editor wrote an article, Hurrah for the Blackshirts, in January 1934, in which he praised Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine". The paper also published articles lamenting the number of German Jews entering Britain as refugees after the rise of Nazism. A sad day that must be lamented on our personal weapon of communicative freedom- Indymedia.

Not so long ago I fell upon some newspaper on the bus, ah, the Daily Mail, I opened it up and was met with an outcry of protest, I felt like the paper was crying, it wanted to share its deep hatred and rejection of something with me. I could immediately sense its contempt for all thought. Alas, a picture of the man himself, that man who encouraged us to 'question everything', who told us that man is essentially a living, labouring creative being, that man who ridiculed liberalism for its absurd premise of the individuated individual, that man who held out the possibility of a world beyond greed and capital. That man who valorised the social, the co-operative over the instrumental and competitive. The picture of this hairy old brethren stared at me. Hello Marx i said. Fancy meeting you here on the 77 back to Tallaght , inside the front cover of the Daily Mail. So your the new Page 3 girl i thought, is this what these bastards have done to ye my old friend. No, of course not Marx replied.

Well, it would appear that Marx had just won an Oscar the night before. Well, BBC 4's Greatest Philosopher of our Time poll. He topped the list after a long battle on BBC phone lines and email. 20 other old geezers whom all said pretty fascinating and also disturbing things were thrown into the philosophical soup of Best Philosophers. Nietzsche , Kant, Hume , even Aquinas was thrown in thanks to the ever reliable Catholic vote. Anyway, Marx won the poll by a fairly large margin, not sure what the odds were but the old man pulled through in the end.

Thus, the Daily Mail decided to tell all those who voted how stupid they were. Marx, that Stalinist, evil Leninist Fascist Maoist bastard managed to edge his way through a poll to win this Oscar that they were sure to strip him of. As you can imagine the two page fold out was quite a read, I laughed myself all the way to the square Tallaght and then on to the mothers house. Didn’t bother stopping to pick up the Jack's roll that i was supposed to in Tesco's , my contempt for the sacking of our comrades in Tesco wholesalers was still bristling around me. Dunnes is too expensive and its on the second floor for feck sake, that requires having to walk pass all the other ugly shops. Anyway , Off I went home, cooked some good old reliable Pasta, bollix, no jacksrole I thought as the dodgy broccoli rumbled inside my over fed stomach, fear not said Marx from page 3! The Daily Mail served its purpose in the end.