Telegraph tank girl origin story
Columnists making other people's suffering their own is not empathy. It's ego.
Empathy is an act of imagination. To truly empathise with someone you have to be able to place yourself in their position. But the empathy of columnists can often be an ersatz kind, a counterfeit emotion ginned up to hit a deadline or to allow pre-existing positions to be smuggled out as honest reactions.
On Tuesday, Judith Woods wrote a column taking aim at that common Daily Telegraph target — anyone under-40 — headlined The me, me, me generation thinks the Ukraine crisis is all about them. She should have directed her lecture at he colleagues instead. In the same edition, Allison Pearson wrote…
Women just like me and my friends, mums wearing jeans and big jumpers, form a production line, exactly as we did when making sandwiches for the school fete or cricket tea.
Except those women in Kyiv are not passing buttered bread to the next person for the addition of cucumber slices; they are making Molotov cocktails, part of a vast national effort to disrupt the enemy.
… before turning the invasion of Ukraine into an opportunity to thrash her usual hobby horses:
If Putin calculated the West was too decadent and too weak to do anything except appease him, he might, almost, have had a point. The outbreak of war has shone an unflattering light on our society… Watch issues like LGBT, net-zero, Partygate, Black Lives Matter and farcical ‘Stay Safe’ Covid restrictions all fade into well-deserved insignificance now that war is back.
Pearson opportunistically dismisses LGBT rights, the future of the planet, questions of political honesty, and issues of public health because, in her glib formulation, “war is back”. War never went away. It’s just that Pearson has found one that she can exploit in the service of her usual arguments. She continues:
The Ukrainians are stronger than us. With a much harder life, these practical people value tradition and are proud to say they love their homeland. Sentiments that would get you called far-Right and racist here are fuelling their phenomenal, patriotic resistance…
That goes beyond recognising the bravery of Ukrainian resistance and becomes a fetishisation of it. One of the Telegraph’s favourite themes is harking back to an imagined 1950s Britain while implying that contemporary existence is a decadent snowflake hellscape; Pearson plays into that. Her implication is that faced with invasion, modern British people would simply surrender.
That’s the same brave Pearson who used her Telegraph column to complain about her son’s C grade in A-Level Drama (having previously written about how easy the exams were) and thinks requiring people to wear face masks in shops was an uncommon kind of tyranny.
Usually, Pearson is peerless even among Telegraph columnists for her ability to make any situation about her but this week she has competition. Today, also writing for The Telegraph, Jemima Lewis contributes a column headlined For the first time, I am starting to regret choosing to have children. She writes:
I’m starting to regret having children. This is, for me, the most extreme side effect of peering over the abyss created by Putin’s war. The future – already so much less promising for my children’s generation than it was for mine – is suddenly darkened by terrors beyond any that I expected to arise in my own lifetime, or theirs.
It’s not that someone should not have dark thoughts or allow their empathy to take them into uncomfortable places but Lewis has written them down for a national newspaper. That opening line alone is enough to provide a therapist with work for several years. It gets worse:
Will my boys, my sweet, bookish boys, have to fight for freedom in Europe? Or my girl, for that matter: she’s brave and combative, and I can see her leading a tank battalion.
But – these are the mental calculations I find myself doing in the middle of the night, in my safe bed in a safe country, for now – my daughter is only 10. The boys are more likely to become eligible for conscription before World War III is over. And that is assuming we haven’t all been nuked first. Which no longer feels like a safe assumption to make.
On one level this is darkly and unintentionally hilarious — a Tank Girl origin story stuffed into a Daily Telegraph column, an apocalyptic vision that still makes sure the kid is officer class — but it’s also solipsistic in the extreme. Centring your children’s imagined war on the comment pages while the news pages are full of children suffering now isn’t empathy, it’s egotism.