John Morrish: Love is all we need. Yeah, right

David Blaine, Paul McCartney, Andrew Lloyd Webber: don't we just hate them? Why?

Good morning, everyone. I want to talk to you about hate, or hatred as it used to be known. I take as my text a chorus from that lovely book, Modern Hymns by Atheists for the Morally Confused.

"Love, love, love

Love, love, love

Love, love, love

It's easy."

These words sprang into my mind last week when I thought about Sir Paul McCartney going down to the river, in all humility, to offer a few words to that unfortunate man he spotted there, naked, hungry, and with no shelter save a transparent Portaloo dangling on a string: David Blaine.

It seems words were also exchanged with a photographer and a member of the public. At that, a policeman turned to Macca and asked him to leave for his own safety.

Love is not easy, despite what the song says, and certainly not for the person who wrote it. And that was? It's a trick question, I'm afraid. Little girl at the back? No, not Ms Dynamite. It was someone called John Lennon.

You will know his song "Imagine", a kind of Khmer Rouge handbook with piano accompaniment. The nihilistic ramblings of a man eaten away by drugs, it is now a key part of our national tradition of celebration, especially where children are concerned. And Lennon, no doubt because of his martyrdom as a man shot down in his prime, has become a kind of multi-cultural saint.

Now, McCartney wrote some even lovelier songs, but we don't really much like him nowadays, do we? Perhaps it is his face, which, to be fair, does have the capacity to irritate.

It certainly irritated Lennon, who went on to write "How Do You Sleep?", in which he nastily - but inaccurately - prophesied that "a pretty face may last a year or two", adding that McCartney's songs were "Muzak to my ears".

Lennon, who liked practical jokes, wrote lots of nasty songs like that, often about McCartney, but sometimes about that select group of women who wouldn't sleep with him. McCartney's songs, meanwhile, tell little stories about people leaving home after living alone for so many years, people who keep their fire engines clean, and people writing the words of sermons no one will hear. They ache with human sympathy or, if you will, love.

But we don't love McCartney. We used to, but perhaps he embarrasses us, because he reminds us of when we were young and silly and felt things deeply. Anyway, he's got the message. Perhaps, it's a new image: perhaps he's angry. Now he's seems to have become Bad Macca, and he is about to airbrush Lennon's friend Phil Spector from the Let It Be album. Bad Macca parks in residents' parking bays and insists he's entitled to use it because his wife is disabled. Bad Macca calls David Blaine an abusive word.

Perhaps Bad Macca will stop trying to do good. We'll like him then, while we continue to loathe Blaine for having the temerity to do something few would dare attempt.

In this country, we have what you might call a love-hate relationship. We love hate. As Noël Coward might have said, a cheap emotion has extraordinary potency.

Look at the mountain of straws loaded on the narrow back of Michael Barrymore last week after he dared to "come back" in the West End. Here, for example, in The Daily Telegraph is the start of "Cheeky" Charles Spencer's review of the show: "'LIVE! On Stage', pro- claim the posters for Michael Barrymore's attempted comeback in the West End, which certainly seems preferable to being, say, 'DEAD! In a Swimming Pool'."

B-boom! Do jokes come any cheaper? He's writing about a man dying on stage, and that's only half a metaphor. For some reason Spencer thinks it acceptable practice to make Barrymore endure being made the subject of a heartless commentary in one of Britain's leading broadsheet newspapers, and his earthly span ticks away before out eyes.

But people admire the skills of a critic like Spencer. This weekend the motorways are packed with parents taking their children to university for the first time. Among them are thousands joining some of the most popular courses around: media studies, journalism, writing for the press. And when they graduate, they will find that there's always room for well-crafted abuse, nearly as much as there is for well-crafted flattery. If last week's newspaper columns are anything to go by, abuse has far more career possibilities. We have the school of Burchill - sound and fury, signifying not all that much - and the school of Littlejohn - ditto - and the school of Brian Sewell, who has the small grace of not sounding like someone you'd avoid in the pub. There are more.

I have to confess that I, too, studied all those schools at one time and learnt how to do it: how to "get" someone with words. There are two techniques. Make a very small, sharp point, and push slowly. Or take a blunt instrument and use a lot of force. Don't think, though, that the media can be blamed entirely. For it has silent accomplices who don't even own up to being part of the crime.

Newspapers and TV pick only targets they know their audience are happy to see kicked. And for some reason, the British today have a insatiable appetite for people to whom they have an inexplicable aversion. Some perennial targets: Sting, Martin Amis, An- drew Lloyd Webber, Noel Edmonds, Carole Smillie, Jeremy Beadle, Stephen Fry, Princess Michael, Chemical Ali, Anthea Turner, bogus asylum-seekers, real asylum-seekers, fat people, sick people, poor people, ugly people, people who drive 4WD cars, people who go to church, people who don't go to church, the Brownies.

You see, once you get going, there's nothing to hating. It's easy, and if you can make a good living out of it, it's almost your duty to do that. Ask yourself, who are these victims of hate crime?

We hate the smug. Step forward, Messrs Fry, Sting and Lloyd Webber. Especially him, now that we can cover our envy of his success and fortune with a snobbish dismissal of his art collection on show at the Royal Academy.

We hate, a little more understandably, the cruel: Edmonds, Beadle, Barrymore and the whole "What, lost your sense of humour?" fraternity.

We hate the fat: after all, eating all that food, occupying two seats on the plane, are they contributing to society? Are they, as it were, pulling their weight?

And we hate beggars, the homeless, sellers of lucky heather. And why do we hate them all? We hate them because they are like us. Not like us as we are now, perhaps, but as we might be if we were magically to become that famous, that rich or that desperate.

Hatred is an emotion for our times. It's rapid, immediately satisfying; it gives you a buzz; it's disposable (though it tends to leave a nasty residue) and, best of all, it involves no commitment. I hate offal, you say, and you mean it, but then a week later you try M. Raymond Blanc's inner organs, and you're a convert.

Hatred is a good investment for the short term, especially in times of war and rumours of war, famines, pestilence and terrifying apocalyptic beasts - for instance, guinea pigs the size of buffaloes.

In the long run, you might want to put a little spare emotional capital into the real gold standard. Or, as we once tended to call it, love. Lennon was half right: it may well be all you need. But it isn't easy. Unlike hatred.