Lost in translation

Hugh Muir, back doing the day-job on The Guardian Diary, today encounters a linguistic problem. In full:

… it has fallen to Northern Ireland assembly Speaker Willie Hay to rule that the term “village idiot” is not acceptable for use within the chamber, after health minister Edwin Poots said his political rival Kieran McCarthy was acting like one. This appears to overturn precedent. Lord Alderdice, a previous Speaker, judged “eejit” to be OK. The key seems to be pronunciation. Fewer problems in the Republic, where there is a list of words banned in the Dáil, including chancer, coward, guttersnipe, rat, scumbag and fascist. But then they had reason to act after one former representative shouted “Fuck you, Deputy Stagg, fuck you!” Seemed better to have some rules.

Two points of clarification, there, Ceann Comhairle:

First, the loose mouth

Emmet Stagg (brother of the more famous, loopier, and more defunct Frank) can look after himself, and needs no defence. Anyway, as a Labour man with a TCD connexion, he gets respected here.

However, Paul Gogarty deserved all he got, and has a track-record for staging similar stunts — Babygate, Callely, numerous “celebrity” outings for RTÉ (not that the bar for celeb-status is that much lower in Dublin). He won the soggy biscuit when he denounced Free Education for Everyone protestors as “muppets” and supported the physical intervention of the Gardai — doubtless in retaliation for FEE previously taking over his office. How Green! What a brave civic activist!

The electors of Dublin Mid-West had Gogarty’s number, all right: in the 2011 General Election, he lost his seat ignominiously. He took all of 3.5 % of First Preferences, limping in eighth of the fourteen runners. The previous outing he had taken 10.8%, and finished second after transfers.

After Gogarty’s excursion in English guttersnipery, it involved a change in Irish parliamentary proceedings:

CHANGES ARE likely to be made to the document dictating acceptable parliamentary language in the Dáil and Seanad after Green Party TD Paul Gogarty’s defence of his use of an expletive in the Dáil last week.

The 18-member Dáil committee on procedure and privileges, which meets tomorrow, will deal with Mr Gogarty’s use of the “f-word”, directed against Labour party whip Emmet Stagg.

Second, a cultural chasm

Anyone familiar with Hibernicisms knows that “eejit” and “idiot”are no way near synonyms.

You’d take a drink with an “eejit”, even a “mad eejit”, and even respect him. You take a swing at an idiot, and be cheered for doing so and laying him out. Gogarty, for example, belongs in this latter category.

Believe it or not (number 94)

There really is an academic study on what is acceptable in a parliamentary exchange. The key “finding” goes this way:

Parliamentary insults are offensive rhetorical acts performed in a highly competitive institutional setting. They are deliberate in the sense that they are intended to be perceived and recognised as such by the person targeted. Unparliamentary language uses can provide important clues about moral and social standards, prejudices, taboos, as well as value judgements of different social and political groups in a community. Because they underlie culturally defined negative values and norms, insults are meant to reduce the targeted person, group or institution (and what they stand for) to stereotypically undesirable or detestable attributes. Cross-cultural studies are particularly enlightening in this respect, since it can safely be assumed that the forms and functions of insults and their respective feedbacks vary in different cultures and institutional settings.

Enjoy that? Then your sociology degree must be showing.

Compare and contrast:

1. David Cameron, 6th December 2005:

… we need to change, and we will change, the way we behave. I’m fed up with the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster, the name calling, backbiting, point scoring, finger pointing.

2. David Cameron, 18th April 2012:

The right hon. Gentleman will not take any lectures on the fuel strike because he is in the pockets of the people who called the fuel strike. That’s right. They vote for his policies, they sponsor his Members of Parliament, they got him elected. Absolutely irresponsible—that is what we have heard once again from the right hon. Gentleman. Not good enough to run the Opposition, not good enough to run the country.

Of which Ann Treneman said in her Parliamentary Sketch for The Times [£]:

Dave did his usual Flashman, refusing to answer the questions, changing the subject to Ken Livingstone’s taxes, playing to the gallery. He was sneery, insulting, preening. When you seeDave like this, you just know he deserves to end up in panto.

For all sorts of reasons …

… the following quotation gives an old member of the Irish Labour Party (Dublin, North Central branch) reason to be satisfied: —

Arriving at Dublin Castle shortly before 9pm, Mr Higgins said he was “very happy with the vote and the support”.

Here’s to you, Mr President.

Every picture tells a story

Malcolm was, from an early age, inculcated with prejudice that those massive Victorian panoramas represented “bad taste”. As the mood and the times changed, he found he quite took to them.

So, last Saturday’s Irish Times magazine, with a full frontal of Louis Lang’s Return of the 69th (Irish) Regiment (see pages 10-11, or as above) and the accompanying article by Lisa Marlowe, was mustard on the beef.

It helped that, a few days earlier, Malcolm had been reading Dr Amanda Foreman. That reminded him the vast eighty-square feet of canvas was representing the aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run, 21st July 1861. This has in the last week been featured in the New York Times‘s running 150th anniversary memorial:

A crisis for the Federal forces had arrived; raising the Rebel Yell for the one of the first times in the war, Confederates built momentum until they forced their enemy into full retreat. Picnicking civilians who had driven out from Washington to witness a Union victory found themselves swept up in a fleeing mass of soldiers, pieces of artillery, supply wagons and carriages that choked the Warrenton Turnpike. Representative Alfred Ely of New York, captured during the chaotic aftermath of the battle and treated roughly by a hot-tempered Confederate colonel, found himself en route to Richmond and confinement in Libby Prison.

The focal point of that Confederate charge was the 69th New York, as Dr Foreman explains:

The field was littered with bodies when Sherman ordered the 69th to make their charge. By now it was late afternoon and many Union soldiers had reached the end of their strength. Sensing his enemies’ exhaustion, in one of his few sensible decisions of that day, General Beauregard ordered the Confederates to make a countercharge. The Rebels surged forward, letting out wild, whooping screams as they ran. The ‘Rebel yell’, as it became later known, froze the Union soldiers in their tracks. Just as Colonel [of the 69th] Corcoran shouted shouted to his men to rally to the flag, two other Federal regiments on the hill smashed into them, pursued by the Confederate cavalry.

The sudden urge to flee spread to other parts of McDowell’s army …

At some point there one might wonder just how magnificent the 69th had been at Bull Run. From which, we might adduce whether this Louis Lang wall-hanging is much more than a propaganda piece.

Now Malcolm would dearly, dearly love to make the 69th New York the heroes of the War — perhaps on a part with the 6th Louisiana Volunteers on the other side. Sadly, it just doesn’t quite work that way.

Up front and central

In the centre of that Louis Lang painting is Captain Thomas Meager, of whom we hear a great deal. Lisa Marlowe has him thus:

Cpt Thomas Francis Meagher is the central character of Lang’s painting, rising above the crowd on the back of his bay horse, waving his cap to the Irish-American grandees on the balcony of the Washington Hotel. After a trip to Paris to congratulate France on its 1848 revolution, it was Meagher who brought back the tricolour that would become the flag of independent Ireland.

Let us move swiftly on …

… to Dr Foreman on the Battle of Antietam (17 September 1862), when Captain Meagher has risen to higher things:

The Irish Brigade lost half its men in less than twenty minutes; the brigade general, Thomas Meager, ‘the Prince of New York’, survived by being too drunk to ride.

Meagher is thereby nominated as number 25 of The not-so-great and the not-so-good.

None of that may seem entirely fair.

However, scrutinise Louis Lang’s great effort carefully. Remember: this is the rough end of New York in 1861. Do you see a single black face? Now consider this, from Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (page 120):

On the docks, the Irish effort to gain the rights of white men collided with the black struggle to maintain the right to work; the result was perpetual warfare. Black workers had traditionally been an important part of the waterfront work force in New York, Philadelphia, and other Northern cities, as well as Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and other Southern ports. By the 1850s the New York waterfront had become an Irish preserve; few black men could find work on the docks except during strikes under police protection, and even Germans were unwelcome. In 1850, Irish laborers had struck demanding the dismissal of a black laborer who was working alongside them. During the strike of 1852, and again in 1855, 1862, and 1863, Irish longshoremen battled black workers who had been brought in to take their places. The Longshoremen’s United Benevolent Society, formed in 1852, was exclusively Irish, even marching annually in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. It is significant, however, that at no time did the Society declare its commitment to an Irish monopoly of jobs, stating instead that it sought to ensure only that “work upon the docks … shall be attended to solely and absolutely by members of the ‘Longshoremen’s Association,’ and such white laborers as they see fit to permit upon the premises.”

This, of course, is all a precursor to the New York Draft Riots of 1863 —which is a polite definition of a pogrom against Black people, which included the torching of an orphanage for back children. Then the (predominantly, but not exclusively) Irish working class of New York went on the rampage:

… by 1862 abolitionist speakers drew huge audiences, black and white, in the city. Increasing support for the abolitionists and for emancipation led to anxiety among New York’s white proslavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly the Irish. From the time of Lincoln’s election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York’s Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern blacks would supposedly flee north. To these New Yorkers, the Emancipation Proclamation was confirmation of their worst fears. In March 1863, fuel was added to the fire in the form of a stricter federal draft law. All male citizens between twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age were subject to military duty. The federal government entered all eligible men into a lottery. Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government three hundred dollars might avoid enlistment. Blacks, who were not considered citizens, were exempt from the draft.

In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government’s intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the “nigger war.” Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that “[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes.” In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery of the conscription law was held. For twenty-four hours the city remained quiet. On Monday, July 13, 1863, between 6 and 7 A.M., the five days of mayhem and bloodshed that would be known as the Civil War Draft Riots began.

At least 120 black New Yorkers (but “not citizens”) were murdered. Even after the Civil War, the reconstruction of an orphange for black children was resisted by good Irish-Americans.

It is worth remembering that the New York Irish were good fighters — but not for abolition.

 

Confusing Campbells (and others)

It’s habit, rather infantile, and a bad one.

Whenever the BBC news-reader says, “And here is a report from our Scotland correspondent, Glenn Campbell”, Malcolm goes into auto-pilot and sings along:

Malcolmian aside:

The Old Boy, in his teaching days, had a regular party-piece about the relevance of popular song to contemporary history.

That Jimmy Webb song from 1969 featured, as the nearest thing to popular culture that the anti-Vietnam War movement achieved.

Especially when here were certain problems playing the obvious first choice for that political moment:  the Country Joe and the Fish clip from Woodstock, complete with integral Fish Cheer. That, at full blast (the only way to go!), in ear-shot of prurient headteachers, wasn’t a promising career move.

But, still, what the hell —

Eventually, inevitably, a smart-arse student intervened that Galveston wasn’t about Vietnam, Webb was thinking of the Spanish-American War. Which, to Malcolm’s disgust, is the authorised version.

Good student, though, that kid: about the only one ever to know of the Spanish-American War. Subsequent discussion proved he was a Dylan freak, and had picked up the reference from With God On Our Side. We know Bob’s and Joanie’s, so here’s Judy’s (about the acoustic best YouTube can manage):

The Scottish connection, please, Malcolm!

What? Wasn’t Joseph Allen McDonald, of excellent Scottish Presbyterian pedigree, good enough to fit the bill?

Still, back to the Campbells.

That was with Paul Waugh today, here verbatim:

[Gordon] Brown even appears to have a new-found gift for media management. Although he was expected to appear on 5 Live last night, an interview didn’t materialise. Instead, he chose to give an exclusive to the BBC via its Scotland * correspondent Glenn Campbell.

That’s a very fair assumption: Glenn Campbell (above, right, with Auld Reekie background) does many of the BBC Scotland programmes with a political lean.

Waugh’s asterisk takes us to the footnote:

*UPDATE: BBC NewsChannell controller Kevin Bakhurst has Tweeted me to say that the Glenn Campbell in question was not the Scottish corr, but another BBC reporter with the same name. I remain slightly baffled as to why it wasn’t Nick Robinson or LauraK who were allocated the interview.

There’s only one video clip to match this rush of Campbells. So, beware! The Campbells are coming!

It’s certainly true that, by contrast, Kuenssbergs (Laura of that ilk, elegantly, left) don’t come in droves, especially equipped with that cultivated lowlands accent.

As for Nick Robinson, the BBC may claim the ex-President of the Oxford University Conservative Association, but Malcolm recognises another, a namesake from TCD (and therefore of greater global and academic significance).

This superior Nick Robinson married the fragrant (and very, very bright) Miss Mary Bourke, also of TCD.

Mary Robinson

Now, didn’t she make good — all the way to Áras an Uachtaráin and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

When comes such another?

Éirígí

Golly gosh!

Malcolm is meant to feel aggrieved that this loud-and-nauseating, self-advertising, narrow children’s crusade is not getting the attention to which it feels entitled.

Well, tough!

Éirígí sell themselves on the basis of that one word translated from the lips of Big Jim Larkin. Pity they don’t try to defend the long version, and see where it gets them in modern Ireland:

I belong to the Catholic Church. I stand by the Cross and the Bible and I stand by Marx and his Manifesto. I believe in the creed of the Church, apostolic, Catholic, and Roman. I believe in its saints and its martyrs, their struggles and the sufferings of my people. The history of Ireland is full of the same spirit, the same struggles, the same sufferings, the struggles and sufferings of my people. In my land this is not held against a socialist. It speaks for him. I defy any man here or anywhere to challenge my standing as a Catholic, as a socialist, or as a revolutionist. We of the Irish Citizen’s Army take communion before we go into battle. We confess our sins. We seek absolution. If a bullet strikes, we hope to have the last rites administered to us before our souls leave our bodies. We do not let the Church stand in the way of our struggle, but neither do we let our struggle stand in the way of the Church.

Anticipation

Shortly the Lady in his Life and Malcolm begin a small expedition. In a way they are answering the invitation of Paul Henry:

That’s up for auction in Whyte’s auction at the RDS next Monday; and in Malcolm’s mind highly desirable.

There are a lot more besides. One that attracts Malcolm is the 15-inch square, mid-70s charcoal and ink monochrome by Sean Keating, father of the (only slightly more political) Justin:

Definitely a lady not to trifle with. The same sale has a couple of other Keatings, one a decent watercolour of the horses of St Mark’s.

There’s even a (to Malcolm, amusing) Percy French watercolour, Sheep in Moonlight, which suggests his humour was not confined to ballads:

French, a far-from-mercenary chap, had a habit of paying for his board-and-lodging by presenting his watercolours. So Ireland is (if not littered) at least replete with them.

Malcolm will not be buying any of these: on a day when public service pensions are under attack the message is “make every penny a prisoner”. If any generous soul wishes to make him a present of any of these, he would be overwhelmed with gratitude.

Else he remains consumed by envy.

More GUBU

Friday’s Irish Times (like all the Irish papers) amounts to an extended scream of political pain. Even in the “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented” (Charlie Haughey’s phrase, which became an acronym, is cited at least twice) an extra layer of the incredible emerges. As In Paul Cullen’s little piece, Departing Ministers take big hit on pay and perks.

Cullen lists the benefits of a government post:

• the ministerial salary of €181,000, which drops to a TD’s salary for the remainder of this Dáil. That pain is lessened because extended service (as these ex-ministers have) qualifies for the top TD salary of €98,000.
• Ex-minister TDs departing at the March election (which will include an inordinate number from Fianna Fáil) receive a pension in excess of €120,000, plus a “severance package” of over €300,000.
• Of course, there is the loss of the ministerial Mercedes and its two gardaí drivers, along with those flights in the government jet;
• There there is the loss of the personal staff, the two special advisers (up to €190,000 a year each), the PA and the personal secretary. Each and every TD has a secretarial allowance of €41,000.
• Let’s not omit the second home allowance for the pad in Dublin. Cullen discreetly glides over this source of bunce: “there is no information on which politicians are in receipt of this”;
• Finally, all those essential trips on official business: bung in the hotel bill, and let’s not forget the €72.66 per night “subsistence allowance”, which should go some way to covering the bar bill.

Anyone who has sat through the pain and grief of the Westminster expenses scandals finds this, and the lack of transparency, definitely GUBU. When Stephen Collins, also in the Irish Times, does his Analysis for the main comment page he has an anecdote:

Responding to banter about his prospects of promotion one rural TD remarked: “I might have some chance as a humble local TD but if I went back to my constituency in a State car I would be stoned to death.”

One sees why the Taliban are mustering in Ballyhooley.

Our friends in the North

It’s yet another Ulster Unionist conclave: like buses you wait forever, then two come along in convoy. The UUP, at the last one, elected themselves a new leader: Tom Elliott, who is to inspiring oratory as a donkey is to the Derby. We are no further forward in the Great Issue of precisely what the UUP is: Cameroonism writ small and provincial (as in the failed UCUNF experiment)? the last refuge of the Malone Road, golf-club and garden-centre unionists? a respectable shine on the shoes and a buffing of the bowler-hat while the initiative passes to the DUP?

Meanwhile, the SDLP, the other older, scorned sibling of its community, has not wholly-dissimilar considerations. The SDLP’s problems increase as the baton passes to the post-Troubles generation and its squeaky-clean-skins among Sinn Féin. And what would the SDLP or SF in the Six Counties give for a production-line of Pearse Dohertys? The problem, of course, is also there for the old men of the unionist parties: how long can the “sins-of-their-fathers” work in a more secular age?

Consider, for a moment, the recent Red-C poll in the Republic: Labour on 24%, SF on 16% and the independents on 11%. Together that’s a 51% majority; and the Political Studies Association of Ireland reckons that gives 48 Labour TDs, 24 Shinners, and 15 independents. Do the math, and remember it takes just 83 votes to elect a Taoiseach and form a government (and independents don’t vote for the uncertainty of fresh elections any more than turkeys vote for Christmas). Those independents will include Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party and Richard Boyd Barrett of People Before Profit, along with other lefties. Above all, with that level of representation, Sinn Féin are no longer outcasts, beyond the Pale, below the salt.

Were the next Dublin administration to have that complexion, suddenly the SDLP is marooned, high-and-dry.

In short, fifteen years on from the end of the Troubles, half-a-decade on from the St Andrews Agreement, we are little forward in climbing out of the denominational, sectarian slime. When one asks why, the answer comes as a variant on Mao Tse-Tung’s comment on the French Revolution: it’s too early, too soon, too precipitant … It’s as if both sides are so wedded to the not-quite-recent past they cannot, dare not move on. Better to have a simmering squabble about some sub-section of a lower paragraph about policing than to have regard to finance and the economy, to jobs (except that persistent double-jobbing among the political class), to infra-structure, to education, to anything that is actually relevant to the way people in Northern Ireland really live. Meanwhile the decay, the inertia, the miasma of error and corruption that lies over the Twenty-Six Counties drifts north and east: expectations drift ever lower with the values of houses.

What strikes Malcolm is the poverty of any “leadership” in Northern Ireland.

He would see a distinction between what persists in Northern Ireland and elsewhere in the rapidly-disUniting Kingdom, between the positions of the various parties and their “leaders” (for want of a better word) in the four Assemblies/parliaments.

In three of them there are elections imminent. Now, his subjective impression is that in Scotland and Wales there are credible leaders and policies being crystalised.

The amazing self-basting Alex Salmond of the SNP and Labour’s Iain Grey (the latter after a slowish start) are credible alternatives. Both have some perspective of what Scotland needs; and seem to have a will to generate it. Even the much-criticised, even by her fellow-Tories, Annabel Goldie has an impressive and waspish “Jean Brodie removed to Renfrewshire” waspish sting to her. Scotland in the election will be a fight to the death.

In Wales, Carwyn Jones has an enviable support (the recent BBC/ICM gave him a 53/14% margin of positive approval) and goes into the Assembly election with 44% support and a united Labour Party. Similarly, only a fool would underestimate the Plaid’s team: any party image-maker would do a Dr Faustus, and sell a soul, for the photogenic face-on-the-posters (and a mind like a rat-trap) of the PC’s Director of Policy, Nerys Evans.

Beyond the personality politics, both Scotland and Wales are building themselves life beyond the Union. This may vex the Daily Mail no end, but the hand-wringings and rendings-of-raiment by the likes of Stephen Glover will seem as further endorsement by any decent politico outside the London loop.

By contrast, in NI, we survey only extinct volcanoes and aching vacuums.

Yet more hair of the dog

Just when Malcolm thought it was safe to raise a head above the parapet again, another brickbat of a reminder wings its way in.

This time it’s all about the boyo Brendan’s brother, Dominic Behan.

Dominic Behan could write as well as his brother. Anyone in doubt of that should get hold of his (sadly, out-of-print) autobiography, Tell Dublin I Miss Her. By chapter 18, Love is Teasing, he’s feeling the stirrings of late adolescence. Stuck up in the Dublin Mountains with other recruits to the bould IRA, he’s having his doubts:

England is to blame for the situation since if she didn’t occupy my country there would exist no national ‘problem’ to serve the old fogies and the young idealists; if Britain left us alone the young people would see that there is not much profit to be gained, ever, in dying for rocks and lakes. They would learn how the real problem in Ireland is one of developing the economy of the country to suit the needs of its people. As you can see, I’ve been talking to people outside the ranks of the rebels – for the first time.

We had been told to stick close to our own camp and have no truck with that crowd out of the Labour Youth movement who were camping up over the hill in Killmisheogue, but since most of them were ex-Fianna members, it was very difficult. Not that I ever attempted to say any thing about them, or keep away from them — like Larry McHale’s dog, I’d go a step of the road with anyone. It was just that, well, the bloke in charge, Billy Reevan, had something about him, and she was fifteen years of age and called Teresa Reevan.

All of that was happening just up the hillside from what, for a couple of miserable years, was Malcolm’s boarding school.

Half-truths, damnable misrepresentations & Iain Dale

Here we go again: Dale quotes in full a post from “Tory Bear” (who is usually agreed to be a Harry Cole, apprentice attackdog —  but veteran enemy of truth, and devoid of much credibility — for the Young Scots Tories)

Who else are close allies of the Labour Party in Europe?

How about Proinsias De Rossa, ever heard of him? Well he is a murdering terrorist who is linked to the killing of six British Policemen. This former IRA man originally joined the Communist and Allies group before transferring to the PES and taking an active role in the drafting of the European Constitution.

Let’s be clear about one thing: back in the 1950s, sixteen-year-old ”Frank Ross” enlisted in the IRA. For that he was interned in the Curragh for some three years. When the split came, de Rossa remained with the Officials, the “Stickies”.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth for Messrs Cole and Dale: Proinsias de Rossa denounced the “armed struggle” and any attempt to bring about re-unification by force.

And here’s another: when Eamon Dunphy, who unlike our two reprobates here has more than the makings of a respectable journalist, used his Sunday Independent column to propose that de Rossa knew of the IRA’s illegalities, it cost £150,000 (reduced from £300,000) in libel damages. And that is in the far less-generous Irish Courts. Anyone who wants the objectionable text and the judgement can find in on-line.

Our gruesome twosome might also take note of  McDonagh v. News Group Newspapers Limited (in the Irish Supreme Court, 23rd November, 1993) . Therein Finlay C.J. opined, of an allegation that a plaintiff had been sympathetic to terrorist operations:

I am satisfied that there are not very many general classifications of defamatory accusation which at present in Ireland, in the minds of right-minded people, would be considered significantly more serious.

Mr Cole may lurk behind his ursine alias, but it would be less easy for Mr Dale.

Hint to Proinsias: Iain Dale, PO Box 279. Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 4WJ

Footnote:

It has been brought to my attention that one aspect of Tory Bear’s post is potentially contentious. As I do not have time to check into it I have deleted the sentence. It does not alter the wider point which the post seeks to make.

Posted by Iain Dale to Iain Dale’s Diary at October 19, 2009 3:44 PM

The “one aspect”, of course, being any shred of truth. When one is presented with a mealy-mouthed non-apology, like this one of Dale’s, decency is also shredded.