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Opinion L.A.

Opinion: Much ado about little

By Michael McGough
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‘Oh, please’ department: I’m no apologist for BP, but the outrage over its chairman’s solicitude for ‘small people’ is ridiculous.

The Swedish-born Carl-Henric Svanberg would have been on safe ground, we’re told, if he had substituted ‘little people’ for ‘small people’ in this quote: ‘I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care. But that is not the case indeed. We care about the small people.’

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‘We’re not small people,’ huffed Justin Taffinder of New Orleans. As if Svanberg had channeled Randy Newman’s lyric: ‘Short people got no reason to live.’ Lighten up: It was a nuance malfunction by someone speaking a foreign language.

The irony in this flap is that American politicians and journalists genuflect at the altar of ‘ordinary people,’ a catchall democratic term that, in its way, is just as patronizing as ‘small people.’

-- Michael McGough

Opinion L.A.
Michael McGough

Michael McGough is the Los Angeles Times’ former senior editorial writer, based in Washington, D.C. He wrote editorials for The Times from 2006 to 2021. Before that, McGough worked for 30 years for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as a reporter, editorial writer, editorial page editor and Washington correspondent. He wrote about law, national security, politics, foreign policy and religion. McGough is a graduate of Allegheny College and also attended the University of Kent at Canterbury in England and Yale Law School, where he received a master of studies in law degree.

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