Translate the following paragraphs into Chinese
From the National Gallery to the BBC, neutrality has
always been an illusion
One of the National Gallery’s trustees was worried about stray dollops of hand
sanitiser upsetting the delicate chemical balance of the historic building.
Another asked about umbrella covers, presumably to stop the punters shaking off
raindrops on to the old masters. But then came a debate about the Black Lives
Matter protests unfolding literally on the gallery’s doorstep in Trafalgar
Square, during which its director, Gabriele Finaldi, warned that “taking a
neutral stance was no longer feasible”.
Like other museums and charities reliant on state funding, the gallery has
always avoided nakedly political statements. But Finaldi felt that “the climate
had changed so that silence was now perceived as being complicit”, according to
minutes of the meeting released this week. Silence is violence, as the placards
say. Decline to pick a side in a culture war and you’re accused of choosing by
default.
But if silence is risky, so is speaking up. Just ask the National Trust, whose
raison d’etre is to preserve historic buildings and so bring a forgotten past
alive. Unless you think the only history worth telling is the nice bits, then
the charity’s recent work tracing its properties’ connections to the slave trade
is just as integral to that mission as celebrating connections to past glory.
Yet the trust’s reward for digging out a hidden history was to be accused by
some members of ruining a nice day out for them, prompting a warning from the
head of the Charity Commission (and Conservative peer) Lady Stowell not to “lose
sight” of its purpose.
These are hard times for the habitually neutral, the impartial, and anyone ever
professionally required to zip it. The BBC is still tying itself in knots over a
leaked instruction that journalists should avoid accusations of “virtue
signalling” by not supporting campaigns “no matter how apparently worthy the
cause or how much their message appears to be accepted or uncontroversial”. The
Beeb denies initial reports that staff were banned from going on Pride marches
or support Black Lives Matter, and is of course absolutely right to insist on
professional impartiality from journalists on air; reporting should mean parking
your own opinions at the door, although the rise of Trump has tested
journalistic ethics to the limit. Yet the BBC still fell foul of questions about
why presenters can still wear Remembrance poppies, which suggests some
undeniably worthy causes are still exempt from the new rule imposed on others.
Why, some asked, isn’t the idea that love is love regardless of who you love, or
that black lives matter every bit as much as white ones, seen as just as
non-negotiable as the idea of honouring the dead?
After all, this is the stuff of broadly settled consensus for Generation Z, or
at least as much a part of their everyday wallpaper as buying a poppy was to
their grandparents. The notion of equality is barely even party political any
more for twentysomething Tories, whose teenage memories are of David Cameron
legalising same-sex marriage and who mostly couldn’t care less if some BBC hack
goes to Pride or not. What may feel exhausting to older generations – the
policing of language, the questioning of ideas they took for granted, the
cultural landmarks now deemed problematic, the endless reasons to feel guilty –
is just life for their kids. Yet for cultural institutions supposed to reflect
the life of a nation or speak to all generations, the definition of what is and
isn’t contentious remains – well, contentious in itself.
The idea of a divided nation can be overdone. This weekend Britain will mark a
socially distant Remembrance Day on our doorsteps, and streets that turned out
every week to clap the NHS will turn out again in silence. Poppies will be worn,
and will mean just as much as the rainbow drawings and “thank you, NHS” stickers
did, although the meaning may differ from neighbour to neighbour. Remembrance
for me, living in a part of the country with a strong military presence, has
become as much about solidarity with the living as honouring the dead; I have
friends who serve or have served, and know this time of year awakens painful
memories for some.
Remembrance feels no more political or controversial to me than clapping did,
but perhaps that’s just me showing my age. By the end, even the clapping had
became wearily politicised for some, consumed by arguments about whether carers
would rather just have a pay rise. It’s hard, in other words, to think of
anything in 2020 so universally uncontroversial, so motherhood-and-apple-pie,
that someone somewhere won’t object to it. But maybe it’s a myth to think there
ever was.
Why does politics keep having to be dragged into every little thing we do, eat ,
wear, and say? The honest answer is that it was probably there all along, but
that some of us have been lucky enough not to have to see it. The easy national
consensus now supposedly being shattered by pesky millennials with their
divisive identity politics – a label for some reason only applied to the left,
although Donald Trump built an entire presidency on the idea of downtrodden
white masculinity – was perhaps only ever an illusion, maintained by shutting
down dissenting minority voices and glossing over the histories that might have
spoiled someone’s nice day out.
Wanting to turn the clock back to a time of not having to argue about it all is
far from a neutral act, even if the young could somehow be persuaded to forget
what they’ve learned about how race, sex or class shapes their lives. For how do
you stay out of politics, when politics has for so long refused to stay out of
you?
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/06/national-gallery-bbc-cultural-institutions