When our cultural gatekeepers make celebrities out of violent criminals

Our cultural debasement continues apace. From Andrew Bolt: ALAN Kohler is only the first to finally apologise for making a hero of Mick Gatto, but even then it’s one of those modern sorrys that just makes it worse. You see, there he was last month, standing up in front of a room full of crooks and spivs, and the gagglers and cheaper celebrities who feed off them. What he was doing there, God knows. With an underworld figure like Gatto sitting right next to him, grinning! Gatto, feted as our newest celebrity! Even Kohler’s wife and friends, he now admits, were upset he could be so dumb, as am I. After all, he’s a wealthy publisher of financial newsletters, an ABC presenter, a former Age editor and now the chairman of Melbourne University Publishing. He’s establishment, suit and tie. Respectable. If anyone would resist this reckless push by so many of our culture makers to scrub Gatto clean and hold him up for the admiration of the knuckle-cracking restless, I’d have bet it would be Kohler. Yet the first thing he said to those assembled crooks, lairs, carpetbaggers and oglers who’d packed the Grossi Florentino in Bourke St was - get this - how ”proud and delighted” he and his MUP were to now publish Gatto’s self-penned whitewash of his career as crook, killer (only in self-defence!) and reputed strongarm man.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous