Roamer's Boring

Year after year we have had to endure the braggadocio of this unaccountable boor. Is it acceptable that we have to put up with this religious fundamentalist, unswerving in his arrogant self-belief? Separately we can do nothing, we are helpless in his indifference to our plaintive pleas for him to mend his ways. There must be something that we can do in the face of this ecclesiastical bully-boy. I speak, of course, of serial recidivist dullard Roamer. But let us look at the evidence from this Sunday's column. First of all, he's a routine deceiver:

When I was first introduced to the British High Commissioner and his wife, then Mr and Mrs Vincent Fean, a rare thing happened. I found myself dropping the defences I normally raise when I meet people for the first time...

So startled is he at his own inability to disassemble before the presence of veteran diplomats that he attempts to tar his interlocutors with the same brush, effectively accusing them of being liars:

They were models of what BHCs and BHC wives should be - friendly, genial without dropping their guard - without giving the impression they were standing on ceremony.

But if sanctimony be the gods' delight, Roamer can certainly count himself an adept practitioner of the art, in which he excels like no other. Nobody will surely be surprised if the parents of Jeanette Mifsud fail to be consoled by his words, which feature in a section suitably entitled Tasteless:

It was a human tragedy not only because a young life had been extinguished. There was, in a most special sense, no need for a visit from Death at such a moment in her life.

As though these offences were not enough, he also attempts in his own inept way to formulate a justification for censorship, which he tactfully describes as gagging. Leaving aside the obvious corollary that derives from the impulse, which would be to lock away Roamer's computer and crayons, let us look at the merit of his argument. In a scene redolent the George Bush pretzel moment, Roamer sets the scene:

Did you watch last Sunday's Dateline London on BBC World? I managed ten minutes and, given the appearance and contribution of Jasmin something (no offence meant) Brown, not to gag.

If I have understood his catastrophically punctuated sentence correctly, the views of someone with whom he does not agree have made him physically ill. And from this it follows, apparently, that "gagging is surely in order when somebody can ignore the paranoid" and "cannot make appropriate distinctions". Of course, I may have been thrown by the fact that he confusingly used the word 'gag' twice in the same article without clearly explaining whether he intends it to have the same meaning on both occasions.
Finally he caps off his article with an extended passage lifted out of a recent issue of The Spectator. Because he has failed to explicitly speak about religion in the course of his column, he has fallen back on the more literate Roger Scruton to do so for him. If the readers have managed to struggle that far into Roamer's 2000+ essay, they may be confused at this segment offering such a fiercely theistic argument. Why would Roamer be so eager to dispel atheistic notions in a country where people overwhelmingly identify themselves as believers and regular churchgoers? Scruton's article was written in response to a TV series on Channel 4 in Britain which sought to disprove the existence of God. Consequently, Roamer's lift has the function of irrelevancy and making his own pained English look even worse than it is already.