Give us this day our Daily Hate

Some of the scariest news I've read in a long time is that the Daily Mail's website is the most popular news site in the UK, and only second-placed worldwide.

Christ on a bike. We're doomed.

I've had a love/hate relationship with the Daily Mail for some time. No, actually, scratch the 'love' bit out, if you don't mind. Seriously, reading the paper is like spending 20 minutes in a home for the mentally ill. You emerge from it feeling exhausted, paranoid and bewildered.

And I think that's the intention. They have their target market and they'll keep blowing that dog whistle every day:

PEEP! There are these people, we hear, who might be getting something you're not. They don't look like you and me. Be angry!
PEEP! Kids these days? All animals. Be scared!
PEEP! That substance might be giving you cancer. Run away!
PEEP! That substance might be a cure for cancer. Panic buy!
PEEP! Scientists? What do they know?
PEEP! House prices, the BBC, wheelie bins, public servants. We have no actual messages here but want you to feel some low-grade hate, folks. Don't let us down!

Anyway. This is a not-too-subtle way of assaulting your senses for a poem I wrote and performed earlier this month. Don't say I didn't warn you:

I have my opinions, I like what I know
I believe I’m correct. You can’t tell me so
I’m a Daily Mail reader, day in and day out
I take what they tell me, with no room for doubt

I really enjoy my own half-hour of hate
It seeks to increase my indignant heart-rate
I’ll tut and I’ll moan and I’ll ask myself “Why?”
It helps me to make the mornings go by

The columnists say where the world’s going wrong
In items of hatred, four hundred words long
If it’s not bloody socialists, it’s those others we see
Whose problem is that they don’t look quite like me

I’m so very happy with my own little truth
I’ll swallow it wholesale with no need for proof
My dad read the Mail, his father did too
I guess we’re all idiots, but what can you do?