Our Maddy of the Sorrows

I confess that almost anything that Madeleine Bunting writes usually has me rolling my eyes by the second paragraph. And that’s on a good day. Some of the pieces from Our Maddy of the Sorrows have been known to push me close to apoplexy. It’s really not good for either my sanity or my health. In June 2006, it was announced that she would be leaving the Guardian to take up the post of Director at the Think-Tank, Demos. Pausing only to wonder whether Demos would have to re-christen itself to be a Belief-Tank, I did permit myself a sigh of relief that I’d no longer be reading her rubbish in the Guardian.

 

Alas, a mere six weeks after taking up the post, Demos announced her resignation, and she scuttled back to the Guardian. I wonder whether we’ll ever learn the true story behind that. The Demos press release is intriguing:

That’s the trouble with incompatible visions, always causing problems for someone or other.

 

Anyway, she’s back, writing the kind of article that we have come to expect. I was going to comment on it, but I see that a far better class of fisking has been delivered by Opehlia Benson, over at ButterfliesAndWheels, and J. Carter Wood at Obscene Desserts. Go and read them and sorrow at our Maddy.

 

Oh, and J. Carter Wood amplifies on something that struck me when reading AC Grayling’s retort to Bunting; that Grayling could be said to have delivered a hostage to fortune with the lax wording of his challenge. Fortunately, J. Carter Wood tightens up the challenge, and demonstrates that the essential point is that the religious have a distressing tendency to insist that their holy books must be right when science points out a discrepancy.