Why does everyone think that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is so clever?
Is it just the beard? Maybe if you nailed a beard onto Wayne Rooney people would start saying he was clever too, rather than thinking him a truculent potato-headed troll with learning difficulties.
Beards are a mask, a diversionary tactic. If you say something stupid but thoughtfully stroke your luxuriant beard whilst doing so, people immediately think you’re not stupid at all, merely
thoughtful, or cleverly thinking the unthinkable. Rowan’s been getting away with this for longer than I can remember. How many divisions does the Pope have? More than enough to deal with
Rowan.
His latest statement of manifest stupidity would not be remarkable at all were it not for the fact that it betrayed a quality we do not usually associate with church leaders, namely spite. Delivering his Easter message via the offices of BBC Radio Four’s regular three minute God-slot, “Pious Wet-Lipped Liberal Wank”, or “Thought for the Day” as others know it, he said that a new law should be enacted to make “all cabinet members and leaders of political parties, editors of national newspapers and the hundred most successful financiers spend a couple of hours every year serving dinners in a primary school on a council estate, or cleaning bathrooms in a residential home.” Never mind the practicalities – how many of the Cabinet would get through the CRB check and be allowed anywhere near schoolchildren? – it is the naked, nasty, barrel-scraping populism of the suggestion which really offends. The sort of sentiment you might hear from the former Sun columnist, Jon Gaunt, on a bad day. Williams picked upon two groups of people – politicians and bankers – whom he knows the public does not much like at the moment and stuck the ecumenical boot in, with a palpable degree of glee.
These awful people should be punished, Rowan thinks, because they have been successful and have consequently acquired a form of power. Never mind, incidentally, that some of the politicians he singles out probably earn less than Rowan Williams (£70,000+ per year) and have rather less constitutional power than the head of our established church. Nor indeed that they do not all have two sets of agreeable grace and favour apartments and supplicants on hand to trim their beards every so often. But, further, it seems pretty clear that he believes the church should look unkindly upon people who have worked hard and achieved much, that they should feel guilty about having done so and pay some form of penance as a consequence. This is not compassion, it is cheap spite and a playing to the usual metro-liberal gallery with its gratuitous reference to a primary school “on a council estate”. Do you go to many of those, Rowan? Or do you just wring your hands from a distance and thoughtfully rub your beard?
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