Don’t Mention the War

Cue the eye-rolling and the blubbering and the oh-so-twee dilemmas that afflict those whose exquisite moral balance must now be re-calibrated yet again after Brussels, this latest slaughter of innocents. It’s getting harder to overlook the obvious, but give the Church of Relativism’s choir its due: the castrati stick to their hymn books come what may.

As The Guardian immediately demonstrated, the first and only approved reaction to mass murder is passive sooking. Don’t get angry, the artists whose work it collected seem to be saying, just have a good snivel and we can bury for the moment those unsettling thoughts of the next and inevitable massacre to come. Je suis Charlie, anyone? Surely the feel-good vanity of that original, empty slogan is good and ready for reprise. Je suis Brussels? Je suis Cologne? Je suis Endeavour Hills? Je suis Parramatta? Why not keep it simple, cut the verbiage, trim the message to a minimum. Je suis a spineless victim. How about that as the motto for…