Posted by magistra ·

Yes, yes, and yes. Or rather, Hitchens would have a stronger allergic reaction to writing the truth than he would to a tablet of Antabuse.

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?

Whoops. Sorry about that.

… I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let’s-face-it bore. I just hope he doesn’t go on one hunt too many and find himself, as twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit.

Oh well. Hitchens rattles off so damn much that I doubt he even remembers what he wrote for the noxious City Journal, and isn’t quite aware that the internets have archives. As for this rambling back-of-a-barmat piece, it makes me wonder whether he and Mart are now on a race to see who best becomes Kingsley Amis.

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.

This leads directly to the obvious (read: desired) conclusion that Amis cannot be a racist because to believe that you’d have to think “he can’t tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another.”

As they say, YCMTSU!

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.

Seriously, what is it with the British press’ (well, mostly the Guardian’s) fellating of Amis, who hasn’t published a decent book in, oh, about fifteen years now? Christ, maybe more. Since he got hold of BIG IDEAS and IMPORTANCE, anyway.

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?)