What I want to say concerns an article (predominantly the second half, or last seven paragraphs) by Brendan O'Neill, SpikedOnline's illustrious editor. The article is a slightly flat and uninspiring variation on an original theme: the erosion of civil liberties. It's quite good stuff, if a little jaded; but notice O'Neill's rhetoric getting the better of him towards the end:
...a bill of rights that was based on a fear of out-of-control politicians and a suspicion of the celebrity-obsessed public would run the risk of turning freedom into stone, ossifying it, making it a museum piece that can be admired by lawyers and professional civil libertarians but which remains beyond the reach of the smoking, drinking, junk food-eating man in the street.
I don't see this. How would a written catalogue of civil rights have less application to the 'man on the street' than lawyers and academics? How would its application be more complicated than the Law, which has no trouble treating its subjects impartially? O'Neill has fallen victim to the felicitous metaphor. He has happened upon an analogy so fruitful that he cannot bear to part with it. The focus of his piece (a written bill of rights) is now dictated by the logic of the metaphor (an artefact on a high shelf behind thick-plated glass in a museum). Never mind that these two things are not analogous: rhetorical logic is irresistible, even to the orator.
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"Excuse me sir, could you reach down that dusty old document for me? I would do it myself, but as a man off the street I find myself unable to, due to the cigarette in one hand, the burger in the other, and the bottles of beer in my pockets."
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