Accept no imitations

Like Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch is a middle class media type who endlessly opines about middle class media types. This might be thought an admirable exercise in self criticism, did he not also seem to exempt himself from said category. This very gesture of self-exemption being, no doubt, itself quintessentially middle-class - the illusion of being outside the game and its stakes can be entertained only by those economically comfortable enough to be leisured and ludic. (The gesture is also, no doubt, just a pre-emptive and guilty act of disavowal that’s peculiarly and comically English). But anyway, Aaronovitch has now ventured into the blogworld proclaiming:

For quite a while now some of the best bloggers have imitated us columnists

This usefully encapsulates what is to my mind the exact reverse of the truth. There are indeed blogs who are parasitic on print journalism, in terms of subject matter and rhetorical style, and who, even as they launch another polemical attack on their chosen columnist, pay him/her the tribute of mimesis. And there is indeed a certain blog contingent whose posts bear the subscript or at least aspiration that ‘this will appear in tomorrow’s Times’, but these have only one foot in the blogworld. Some resemble nothing so much as those early filmmakers who still obeyed the rules of theatrical space, or the photographers who took their cue from portrait painting. And as Nietzsche said:

The profoundest and least exhausted blogs will always have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Pensees.