The Way of Bastards

Because there is no other way to describe the cowardice. Simon Barnes says it exactly, in an article on sport and seriousness this morning, one that reduced me to tears for the first time since a favorite Uncle's funeral. Just go read it:

AND so at a stroke the city of joy became the city of horror.

That is the way of bastards: they hit us when we are most vulnerable and they rejoice in doing so. On Wednesday, we were celebrating the fact that in London in seven years’ time, thousands of people will do thousands of silly things to get a bit of tin hung round their necks and we were all relishing the way we would cheer ourselves silly in response.

...

The sort of people who spoil sport in that terrible way seemed at that moment more vividly wicked than any other kind.

Sport is, above all, a celebration of being alive. Those people who willingly and frivolously turn it into a festival of being dead are bastards. Their eagerness to spoil the world’s innocent frivolities spells out the eternal truth about terrorism. It is this: terrorism is not about achieving things; terrorism is an end in itself.