Dead and buried?

Reader question:

Please explain this sentence, with “dead and buried” in particular: The $2 billion merger deal failed, but it is too early to declare it dead and buried.

My comments:

Two companies wanted to merge in order to create a joint venture worth $2 billion. But their attempt failed because they couldn’t reach an agreement in details.

They may talk again in future, however, and, if they can iron out their differences, a merger is still possible.

So, don’t count the deal as dead and buried.

Dead and buried, as you can guess, means really dead, with no chance of being revived.

Here, the merger deal is likened to a dead person, one who is declared dead and later buried after a funeral.

We know of people who are declared dead in the hospital but who comes to life again. That sometimes happens. We never hear, however, of anyone who’s long buried underground coming alive again.

And that’s the idea of “dead and buried”, meaning something, be it a merger and acquisition proposal or any odd idea, is dead.

Like, really dead or, as Charles Dickens was wont to say, as dead as a doornail.

In other words, dead and gone. It can never be revived or restored or reactivated to its former, um, form and therefore should be forgotten.

Like, forever forgotten.

Got it?

All right, here are recent media examples of “dead and gone”:

1. More than two years after a European Super League (ESL) proposal rocked the foundations of the soccer world, the ESL has found its way back to the forefront of the sport following a landmark ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ).

On Thursday, Europe’s top court ruled that FIFA, the sport’s international governing body, and UEFA, the continent’s governing soccer body, acted contrary to EU competition law by blocking plans for a breakaway ESL.

That news was celebrated by Spanish soccer giant Real Madrid, which has been leading the fight to get the new competition off the ground.

“Today a Europe of freedoms has triumphed, and also football and its fans have triumphed,” said club president Florentino Pérez. “We are facing a great opportunity to improve European club football.”

The court’s decision has resurrected the proposal many thought was long dead and buried – much to the dismay of fans who mightily protested against the league in 2021. Read on for a primer on this controversial topic.

What is the European Super League?

The ESL is a proposed seasonal soccer competition for club teams in Europe. It was proposed on April 18, 2021, by a group of 12 of Europe’s biggest and most storied teams from across England, Italy and Spain, including Real Madrid, Manchester United and Juventus.

At the time, the proposal was a 20-team elite soccer tournament that would have seen locked-in places for up to 15 of the founding clubs. It would have effectively replaced the Champions League, which is run by UEFA, as Europe’s current top club competition.

In the Champions League, teams enter on merit, usually depending on their place in domestic leagues – and there are no guaranteed spots.

But that plan fell through almost instantly. The formation of the ESL led to widespread condemnation from UEFA and several national soccer federations, including those in England, Italy and Spain.

UEFA and the governing bodies of those federations, warned that any clubs involved in the ESL would be banned from all other domestic, European and world football competitions, and noted that players from those clubs would also be banned from representing their national teams.

These threats, along with widespread fan anger, prompted nine of the original 12 teams to back out of the competition almost immediately, leaving only Madrid, Juventus and FC Barcelona – until Juventus withdrew earlier this year.

Just days after it was proposed, the ESL announced it was suspending its operations.

- What to know about the Super League, the proposed competition shaking European soccer, CBC.ca, December 21, 2023.

2. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Saturday that he is scrapping his predecessor’s controversial policy to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda as he vowed to deliver on voters’ mandate for change, though he warned it will not happen quickly.

“The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started,” Starmer said in his first news conference since the Labour Party swept Conservatives from power after 14 years. “It’s never acted as a deterrent. Almost the opposite.”

Starmer told reporters in a wood-paneled room at 10 Downing St. that he was “restless for change,” but would not commit to how soon Britons would feel improvements in their standards of living or public services.

The 30-minute question-and-answer session followed his first Cabinet meeting as his new government takes on the massive challenge of fixing a heap of domestic woes and winning over a public weary from years of austerity, political chaos and a battered economy.

“We have a huge amount of work to do, so now we get on with our work,” Starmer told them.

…

Conservatives struggled to stem the flow of migrants arriving across the English Channel, failing to live up to ex-Prime Minister’s Rishi Sunak’s pledge to “stop the boats.”

The controversial Rwanda plan was billed as a solution that would deter migrants from risking their lives on a journey that could end up with them being deported to East Africa. So far, it has cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars and never taken flight.

Starmer denounced it as a “gimmick,” though it’s unclear what he will do differently as a record number of people have come ashore in the first six months of the year.

“Labour is going to need to find a solution to the small boats coming across the channel,” Bale said. “It’s going to ditch the Rwanda scheme, but it’s going to have to come up with other solutions to deal with that particular problem.”

Suella Braverman, a Conservative hard liner on immigration who is a possible contender to replace Sunak as party leader, criticized Starmer’s plan to end the Rwanda pact.

“Years of hard work, acts of Parliament, millions of pounds been spent on a scheme which had it been delivered properly would have worked,” she said Saturday. “There are big problems on the horizon which will be, I’m afraid, caused by Keir Starmer.”

- New UK Prime Minister Starmer Says Controversial Rwanda Deportation Plan “Dead and Buried", Associated Press, July 7, 2024.

3. This isn’t a column. It’s an obituary.

Donald Trump’s improbable, historic, decisive victory on Tuesday showed us that the so-called free press is dead and buried.

Outlets from CBS to NBC to ABC to CNN to MSNBC to The Washington Post and The New York Times and countless others like Politico and The Atlantic went all-in on defeating Trump with overwhelmingly negative and oftentimes patently dishonest coverage – and they failed miserably.

Weeks of their electioneering couldn’t bring the voters to their side.

Headlines alone reveal how they served as de facto surrogates for the Kamala Harris campaign.

The New York Times: “Harris and Democrats Lose Their Reluctance to Call Trump a Fascist”

Politico: “Meet the sleeper conservatives who could help fulfill Trump’s promise to be a dictator on Day 1”

The Atlantic: “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini”

And when the election results actually arrived, the mainstream media reaction was unhinged, insane and unintentionally hilarious.

Trump and J.D. Vance won going away – not only by sweeping every swing state, but by winning the popular vote, the first GOP ticket to do so since 2004.

They thereby stripped the Democrats and the media of any chance to cry foul about the will of the people being superseded by the Electoral College.

So without any controversy over the tally – and after propping up the worst presidential candidate in history in a fruitless effort to get her over the finish line – these activists posing as journalists had nothing left but unfiltered and unhinged emotion.

And it was delicious to watch as the returns came in.

Take David Axelrod on CNN, for example. The former Obama strategist is usually rational, but with his candidate losing so badly, he could only play the hatred card.

“Let’s be honest about this. Let’s be blunt about it: There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country,” Axelrod argued.

Yup. That makes total sense: A candidate rejected by Democratic voters in the 2020 primaries is the victim of racism and sexism.

That’s a hell of a way to talk about your own party’s base.

- Mainstream media dug its own grave with absurd Trump election coverage, NYPost.com, November 7, 2024.

本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）