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Saturday 26 May 2012

Too many teardrops

Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young

True grief is often swamped by the mawkishness of strangers

Some things don’t change in Britain: the teddy bears and CCTV pictures, for example. First come the teddy bears. A princess dies in a sordid drunken accident, a child is abducted in Portugal, two girls are brutally murdered in Soham, a child is shot accidentally-on-purpose and you can’t open a newspaper without seeing a photograph with a teddy bear in the foreground among the gladioli. The legitimate grief of the people most directly involved is swamped by the maudlin tears of strangers who muscle in on it; and the stuffed toy becomes for us what black-plumed horses were for the Victorians. I look forward to the day when the lions in Trafalgar Square are replaced by teddy bears, as being more consonant with the new, improved British national character.

Then, if the occasion of the outpouring of ersatz emotion — one might call it a griefoid-reaction — is a peculiarly nihilistic crime, the announcement soon follows that it took place on camera.

More articles from: Theodore Dalrymple | this section

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