Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

The Mail: Making everyone unhappy

Sometimes it's easy to forget that the Mail makes everyone unhappy. You know, it's simple enough to expect someone like me - a disgusting Guardian-reading liberal - to be annoyed by what I read in there. At the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Mail, you'd expect me to be a bit peeved by what the likes of Hitchens, Phillips and Littlejohn have to say. That much is pretty obvious.

But then I got to thinking: the Mail doesn't make Mail readers happy either. It makes them miserable. It makes them frightened, disappointed and frustrated. It makes them angry. They would like to live in a Britain that's like a great big Thelwell cartoon, with lots of nice middle-class people being pleasant towards each other and plump little children riding horses. And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way.

But instead of presenting to its readers that kind of Britain, it shows them a Britain that bears as little relation to reality - a place where immigrants jumping over the fences at Sangatte are cheerily waved into the country, allowed to stay despite being illegal, given priority in the housing queue, given thousands of pounds on benefits and generally bleeding the hard-working British taxpayer dry.

The Britain the Mail presents to its readers is a place where anyone under the age of 45 is most likely a violent drug-crazed hoodie who spends all their time on the evil internet, looking at Facebook, which detaches them from society enough to be able to carry out psychopathic violence against anyone who leads a normal or respectable life. It's a place where these criminals are given lovely air-conditioned luxury cells, that's if they go to jail at all, because more than likely they'll be allowed to charge the taxpayer to get off their crimes because of "Human Rights".

That Britain is also a place where a shadowy liberal elite are in charge of all institutions, particularly the hated BBC, where the horror of political correctness and the diversity brigade have meant that anyone harmlessly buying a golliwog, calling a black person a nigger or saying they think women can't do jobs as well as men gets hauled over the coals. It's a place where nice, ordinary white middle-class folk find themselves discriminated against, and minorities of every stripe get given priority in everything ever. In short, it's the world that only really exists in the mind of BBC Have Your Say commenters, Noel's HQ and Doncaster Mayor Peter Davies; it's that confected place where the criminals are allowed to get away with everything, Britain's gone Bonkers and Health & Safety and Political Correctness have corrupted our once-great country and made it horrible.

Who would want to live there?

So, far from making people like me annoyed while giving its archetypal reader something to cheer to the rafters, the Mail wants to make us both angry. Me because I know they're talking rubbish; they because they're having their very first fears confirmed. We both end up disappointed and dismayed, for very different reasons. And it needn't even be that way.

And then there's another kind of anger that the Mail brings out. It's a place where I think everyone in the entire country can join as one - those of us on the left, on the right, everywhere.

So I propose an experiment. I believe that the Mail can make anyone angry, no matter how calm they were to begin with. Go and have a long Radox bath, read a nice book and feel completely relaxed and happy with the world. Feel contented and pleased with yourself and the world.

Now take a deep breath and remove all sharp objects from the immediate vicinity, because this isn't going to be pretty.

Exhibit A. Read this article by Naomi Greenaway. The headline "When you find your cleaner wearing the same outfit as you, isn't it time to reach for designer labels again?" should be a clue as to the foulness within. Naomi:

Last Thursday, just as I was leaving the house for a business appointment, my cleaner arrived - wearing exactly the same dress as I was. A £15 H&M special. She was about to scrub the loo. I was heading off to do an interview.
I know I'm not meant to admit this, but I spent the rest of the day feeling quite substantially less than a million dollars - and the dress I'd once loved, and thought of as a fantastic, stylish bargain, is now shoved in the back of my wardrobe, unlikely to see the light of day until its trip to Cancer Research.

Angry yet? No...? Well then let me bring you exhibit B. It's one of those 'he says, she says' articles, by Anne Shooter and Tom Sykes, two of the finest brains working for the Daily Mail. There's even an introduction by Allison Pearson, just to get the hackles up.

Pearson:

Surely the whole point of the female chassis is to get a passing mate to slow down, wink his indicator, pull over and revv those engines till the spark plugs pop. That's what Mother Nature designed the female for.

Shooter:

In fact, when I have ever lamented my rather generous proportions, they have only ever given my bottom a good squeeze and told me not to be ridiculous.

Sykes:

Why do we have to pretend we like saggy bottoms, stretch marks and drooping boobs?
That's what we get in real life anyway.
The truth is it takes courage to admit that what gets your imagination racing is the most two dimensional of blonde bimbos.

Are you raging? Are you foaming at the mouth? Are you prepared to commit an unspeakable act of violence against a furry animal? No...? No...?! Well then this will tip you over the edge. Exhibit C (hat-tip to Feminazery) is this story about an actress, sensitively headlined

Why sexy Transformers star Megan Fox is not body perfect... she has clubbed thumbs

Oh noes! You mean to say a woman isn't entirely 100 per cent perfect?

On close inspection, Megan's thumbs almost look more like toes - although they haven't held her back in her career.

And yes, there are pictures, showing you that indeed, this woman's thumbs are very slightly different from normal! Horrors! Shall we burn her as a witch? Shall we force her to quit her chosen career because she is slightly different? Is that what we'll do then?

By now, you should be tearing the wings off butterflies and destroying entire buildings with your bare hands. If not, you're clearly unflappable, and immune to the power of the Mail. In which case, I congratulate you. For the rest of us, I'm afraid, it's a couple of hours in a darkened room with a picture of a nice fluffy kitten to bring us down from the zenith of rage...

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