Standing up to Martin Amis (2)

In particular, to defend Martin Amis from the charge of patheitc liberalism by using his Times quote to show that he really has the courage to agree with Mark Steyn may not entirely convince all _Guardian_ readers that Amis is not in fact an ignorant racist:

bq. Even five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to picture … [Amis] …using terms such as “deportation.” Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He [Steyn] need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.

France is on its way to becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb (“House of War”), but without a fight.

Which is why one seldom sees anyone entering the Jardin du Luxembourg without a snout deep in a bifurcated baguette pairing twin thin slivers of ham and Emmentaler, and why they mandate Louis Vuitton veils in public schools. Right. Just so.

Why do so many professedly manly men incessantly insist the rest of us share their deepest fears? (Don’t answer that: the obvious question is, what sort of person could ever take them seriously?)

What would Martin Amis have to do in order to lose his reputation as a “major” or “important” writer? Is there literally anything that he could write which might make literary editors and critics say “actually this man is really rather untalented”? Or has he achieved a sort of event horizon of writerliness, at which his seriousness and density have become so great that there can be no escape? I suspect the latter; surely a reputation that has survived “Koba the Dread”, survived “Yellow Dog” and now survived this, must be indestructible. Long after the nuclear holocaust when we are all dead, the cockroaches that crawl through the ashes of Western civilisation will still take Martin Amis seriously, although none of them will know why.

The cockroaches may hang on for the bitter end, but I think a lot of people are deciding that Amis’ recent bouts of menopausal hysteria are reason enough finally to pull the plug.

It’s striking to see Chris Morris having a go at him, for one. Brass Eye’s scripts (a vigilante-beaten paedophile ending up “quadrospazzed on a life-glug”, etc) were very Amis – consciously so, I’d bet. In the six years since, the man has inexorably shrunk. His titchiness has gone beyond pitiful, and is now outright offputting.

7: It’s sort of bleakly amusing that after having a bit of a go at Amis’ juvenility, Morris notes piously that “he must be allowed to speak as freely and as radically as he pleases.” Because obviously calling him out as the bigot he is constitutes an attempt to silence him.

That’s not Morris though.

Whoops. Sorry about that.

I don’t normally comment on people’s mental well-being, but is Hitchins now actually delusional (in the sense of being unable to tell the difference between reality and one’s own ideas)? At one point in the article he says:

One would have to have a capacity for fantasy of something like that order to believe in the Ronan Bennett universe of modern persecution where “those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are anti-semites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists.” In which known world is that happening?

Does he not know what rightwingers say about anti-war protesters? Can he not remember what he himself and his friends have written? Does he actually understand what he’s writing as he writes it?

I think it is Alan Bennett in his “Untold Stories” who manages to get in a dig on Amis; out of nowhere he notes what a waste of time it is to read anything by Amis.

Chris Morris is a perfect representative of a left/liberal self-styled intelligentsia united by its smugness, insularity, arrogance and utter lack of any kind of discriminating intelligence. Amis is a pub bore, but some of his arguments deserve serious consideration. Retreating into the usual self-deluded liberal piety isn’t a satisfactory response.