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Martin Amis & Chris Hitchens: Vicious
Racism Concealed by a British Accent
Martin Amis' new book, The
Second Plane, is worth discussing only as a symptom of the plague of
British right-wing ("Tory") rhetoric popping up in American conservative
discourse. The American right wing, desperate for articulate hate mongers,
has taken to importing Tory polemicists to stir the base up against the
Muslim/Arab "enemy."
In mealymouthed America, where most people are shocked by anything
stronger than "You know what? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that," the
Tory writer's comfortable, familiar stance toward hatred can make an
undistinguished hack seem like a powerful voice. That's why Christopher
Hitchens is now the darling of right-wing America. Our homegrown hate
mongers, like Ann Coulter, are so painfully amateurish and ham-handed that
Hitchens, simply by applying the old Tory hater's kit, can seem like a
master.
Apparently, even educated American editors are suckers for imported
British bile. That's the only way to explain the fact that many of the
essays collected in The Second Plane were originally published by
the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. So, more as a
public-health warning than a literary review, here's a look at Tory
rhetoric as exemplified by Martin Amis.
Tory discourse has only two topics: hatred of the new and foreign, and
grief for the old and familiar. The object of its hatred changes its name
from generation to generation, from Papist to Jew to Irish to German to
Russian to Arab; but the methods used to vilify the currently demonized
alien are remarkably stable over the generations. Every device Amis uses
to vilify Arabs and Muslims can be found, aimed at other targets, in Tory
literature going back several decades.
Martin learned the poison-pen trade at home, from his father, novelist
Kingsley Amis. Like Hitchens, Kingsley started out by calling himself a
leftist, but a leftist who hated almost everything about the left except
that fact that it shared his hatred for his social superiors. Once his
novel Lucky Jim became a hit and he joined the elite, Kingsley
discovered that he had no further grudges with the Tories and spent the
rest of his life vilifying women, non-whites, and anyone else who failed
to meet his standards of English-ness.
To American readers, the targets of Tory xenophobia can seem bizarre,
even comic. For instance, in Lucky Jim, Amis Senior rails against
Italian cooking, denouncing olive oil at some length as a vile "butter
substitute." Keith Waterhouse, another Tory writer of that era, devotes
half a page in one of his novels to a similar sermon against pizza. This
obsession with Italian food, which was just coming into fashion in
Britain, suggests an important difference between British and American
right-wing writing: While most American conservative rhetoric pays lip
service to "melting pot" rhetoric, British writers are openly xenophobic,
assailing all foreign influences, whether in cookery or movies. Hitchens,
for example, took a bizarre detour in one of his screeds to denounce the
unfair presentation of medieval English royalty in Braveheart.
And unlike most American rightists, British Tories are always
defeatists, convinced their cause is lost, paralyzed by nostalgia for an
imaginary golden age or fighting a rearguard action in defense of a
doomed, yet superior culture. In Lord of the Rings terms, England is
Gondor, Mordor is the alien (the Arab/Muslim, at the moment), and without
a Frodo-level game-saver, we're doomed. You can hear this sort of wretched
whine even in pop music, as when Morrissey moans, "We are the last truly
British people you will ever know." (Though in an amusing twist, Morrissey
later came out of the ethnic closet and admitted he was Irish.)
It's not that psychiatrists don't pass out enough Prozac across the
Atlantic. There's a very sound basis for Tory gloom: Britain lost the 20th
century. Take a look at a map of the world circa 1900 and you'll see what
a devastating fall England has suffered. In 1900, most of the Tropics were
colored British pink. Now all that's left is Britain itself, a wet little
island.
The logical conclusion for the Tory, looking back on that great fall,
is that the 20th century was a horrible mistake. By contrast, America
seemed to be doing very well right up to Sept. 11, 2001 (though some would
place the catastrophe a bit earlier, on Nov. 5, 2000, or Jan. 20, 2001).
Only after 9/11 and the Iraq catastrophe did right-wing America feel a
doomed affinity for Tory gloom and hatred.
So now Red-State America is in the mood to hear that the whole modern
world is a big mistake. That was exactly the argument of Paul Johnson,
popular right-wing historian of the Thatcher era. But since he couldn't
say outright that the natives were better off when ruled from London, he
resorted to literary techniques to make anti-Imperialist heroes like
Gandhi into villains in his big Thatcher-era pop history book, Modern
Times. Johnson showed Tory writers how to defend the indefensible
(imperialism, colonial massacres) using literary devices rather than
argument. So although he can't really say outright that everything was
better when London ruled India, he devotes a strange amount of space to
slandering the sexual practices and toilet habits of Gandhi and the
suspect lack of sexual enthusiasm of former U.N. Secretary General Dag
Hammarskjold.
Johnson's career as moral enforcer ended in the usual way, when the
part-time girlfriend who'd been whipping his bare bottom for years grew
tired of listening to Johnson talk about the sanctity of marriage and his
love for his wife. She took a page out of Johnson's book by selling her
lurid story to the tabloids. Johnson's response was a classic: "We are all
sinners. I know I am." By that time, of course, everybody knew.
Martin Amis shows himself a worthy disciple of Johnson by using sexual
slander as the main persuasive device in "Terror and Boredom: The
Dependent Mind," an essay on the life and works of Islamist Sayyid Qutb.
Amis implies that 9/11 came about because of a murky shipboard sexual
incident involving Qutb a half-century ago. In this typical piece of Tory
slander, Islamism has nothing to do with real political issue but is the
product of one man's sexual problems: "Promptly giving up hope of coming
across a woman of 'sufficient' cleanliness, (Qutb) resolved to stick to
the devil he knew: virginity."
Stretching the notion of sexual maladjustment as the root of all
Islamic evil, Amis makes one of his most unintentionally funny points by
contrasting a crowd of dark, threatening Pakistani youths with normal,
healthy, drugged, drunk and horny Western youth. It seems these Pakistani
kids harassed one of Amis' friends. We're not told what the friend was
doing on their turf. In Tory rhetoric, the white intruder is always
perfectly innocent, and any hostility shown him, even when he's in
Imperial uniform and bayoneting civilians, is mere unjustified rudeness.
Amis' comparison of these vile non-white kids to their wonderful Western
counterparts has to be read to be believed:
"At this time of day, their equivalents in the great conurbations of
Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations
by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary
restrictions by downing yet more alcohol as well as additional stimulants
and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed
dance floors, and (in a number of cases) by having galvanic sex with
near-perfect strangers."
There's so much sheer nonsense here that it's difficult to pick the
most absurd phrase, though I confess a personal fondness for that wacky,
out-of-left-field slap Amis gives, in passing, to Muslim dietary laws.
Yes, clearly the reason that Western youth don't fly jets into buildings
is that they can eat "large meals with no dietary restrictions." Does that
put Orthodox Jews on the no-boarding list?
What makes this passage so typical of Amis, and so godawful, is that
it's written in ponderous, 18th century prose, as if Doctor Johnson had
decided to write in favor of ecstasy-soaked raves. Adding to the comedy,
Amis then sprinkles his leaden prose with neologisms that would have had
the good Doctor howling on the floor.
Most writers would giggle at a word like "conurbations" and settle for
something ordinary, like "cities." Not Amis. Most writers would flinch
when reading over a first draft containing phrases like "their not very
sharp frustrations," "strobe-lashed" and my favorite, "galvanic sex"
preceded by the earnest parenthesis "(in a number of cases)." I can't read
that phrase "galvanic sex" without thinking of high-school biology and
jumping frog legs, and I still wonder whether "in a number of cases" (how
many exactly, Marty?) means that some unlucky Western youth don't get to
have sex at all, or merely that their couplings don't rate the adjective
"galvanic." I'm also a little worried by "near-perfect." Golly, was there
an embarrassingly placed mole? Tan lines?
Tory writers always go a little crazy when sex comes up. One of Amis'
most distinguished predecessors in the use of sexual slander against the
Left is C.S. Lewis. Lewis knew very little about the modern world -- or
women, or sex -- except that he was against the lot. So rather than
research the topic and risk learning something, he resorted to novelistic
technique, peopling his anti-modern science-fiction fables with homophobic
caricatures like the sadistic nurse Hardcastle, a socialist monster who
delights in putting out her cigars on the heroine's breasts.
Torture has always been the big sexual thrill in Tory polemical
fiction. It's always attributed to the evil alien, whether a Chinese
dealer in white slaves, a sadistic Prussian officer, or, as in Martin
Amis' story "In the Palace of the End," a thinly disguised version of
Uday, Saddam Hussein's son. In this sample of Amis' tour of Uday's
pleasure palace, Amis offers the reader an entirely imaginary catalogue of
depravity, including pedophilia, sadism and bestiality:
I said, "What was in that sack?"
Earlier that morning I had spent an abnormally uncomfortable
half-hour yelling at a suspect while a blood-steeped canvas mailbag
jerked and jumped around the cubicle floor. The scream it emitted put
one in mind of a boiling kettle. "Yes," he said, "A severe measure. The
sack contained some starving animals plus the suspect's 3-year-old
daughter." "So I imagined. But wasn't there something unusual about the
animals?" "Not in themselves. You know -- 'bats and cats and rats.' But
the vet said they'd been overstarved. So he gave them all a shot.
Amphetamine. A very stubborn case."
A 3-year-old girl tortured to death by being tied in a sack with
drugged vermin, screaming like "a boiling kettle" -- some might call this
the sickest child porn they've ever read, but the New Yorker,
America's most venerable literary magazine, saw fit to publish it.
The funny thing is, Tory propagandists hate America themselves. Until
he was bribed to prop up Bush, Christopher Hitchens spewed the usual Tory
loathing for the United States, based in resentment of the usurpers who
took over Britain's imperial role. Mark Steyn, Tory darling of the
neocons, once wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph, a Tory
rag, titled "The United States of Losers and Bozos," chortling over
America's bungled response to the terrorist bomb at the Atlanta Olympic
Games. There's a very strong whiff of this delight in American misfortune
in Amis' title essay, "The Second Plane," as when he chuckles: "The
Pentagon is a symbol, and the WTC is, or was, a symbol." Yes, "or was."
Thank you for clarifying that, for rubbing the past tense in the reader's
face. Reading that title essay, one veers between shock at the sheer
awfulness of the writing, to disgust at Amis' delight in the gory details
of an American icon being destroyed.
The appalling prose style is set in the first sentence of the book: "It
was the advent of the Second Plane sharking in low over the Statue
of Liberty." That loud, clanking metaphor, "sharking in," is classic Amis,
the sort of thing first-year creative writing students consider great
writing until they hear the giggles of their classmates.
Another classic first-year prose technique is the use of religious
terminology, like "advent," in describing extreme violence. Violence and
the Sacred, as first-years have been taught for generations; it's the
formula set in hard-boiled detective prose, except that Amis is playing a
Naked Gun narration over a rather larger murder scene than
usual.
Sheer nerve is Amis' strength, the kind that lets an author do a Lt.
Frank Drebin voiceover of a catastrophe. And clearly, sheer nerve will
carry you a long way, especially with an audience as gullible as the
editorial staff of New Yorker -- which actually published this
trash.
Sometimes the stupidity of Amis' assertions is so blatant that one
can't see how any reader, no matter how tone-deaf or logic-challenged,
could let them pass. For example, what are we supposed to make of Amis'
solemn claim that "the Second Plane meant the end of everything"?
How about, "No it didn't"? And what dozing copy editor passed on this
clunker: "For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future"? Just
read that sentence over a few times, savor its rottenness. The first thing
you notice, of course, is the showy, clumsy metaphor "worldflash," one of
those neologisms whose difficulty is supposed to pass as innovation.
Dazzled by this high-profile clunker, you might miss my favorite part of
the sentence, "a coming future." Yes, that's what futures tend to do,
isn't it? Come, I mean. As far as I can see, there is no reason on earth
to add "coming" to "future" unless you're (a) none too bright and (b)
being paid by the word.
Still on the very first page of the book, we learn that "Flight 175 was
an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (capitals in original) aimed at
(America's) innocence."
Innocence? How, exactly, does a Manhattan office block stand for
"innocence"? The World Trade Center could be said to stand for many
admirable things, like drive, daring and ambition -- but innocence? And
what are we to make of Amis' pronouncement that the WTC attacks were "the
apotheosis of the postmodern era -- the era of images and perceptions.
Wind conditions were also favorable"? Wind conditions were favorable for
postmodernism? A nice sunny day with variable interpretations and
occasional showers of vaporized concrete?
Look closely at that passage, and you can see how crude and provincial
Amis' prose really is. As usual, he starts with a misapplied religious
term, "apotheosis," followed by secondhand, dated seminar jargon: "the
postmodern era -- the era of images and perceptions." Baudrillard himself,
the old fraud, would cringe at such a simplistic parroting of his
catchphrases. Is Amis really so ignorant that he thinks previous eras
lacked iconic images of cataclysmic events? Remember the Maine? The
Plague? The Crucifixion? I seem to recall that those pre-postmoderns had
something of a knack for capturing great death scenes.
Viewed as literature, The Second Plane is utterly worthless
bombast. It doesn't make any sense, and isn't even really meant to make
any sense. It's simply hysterical funeral rhetoric, and there was a lot of
it in the aftermath of 9/11. That's understandable. What's not so easy to
understand, or forgive, is that the editors of America's leading journals
saw fit to publish this trash, and that even now, seven years later,
American reviewers are overawed by this grotesque collage of bombast,
defeatism, hate-mongering and sadomasochistic pornography.
John Dolan is an editor of the Moscow-based English-language
alternative paper, The eXile. He is the
author of, most recently, Pleasant
Hell.
John Dolan is an editor of the Moscow-based English-language
alternative paper, The eXile. He is the
author of, most recently, Pleasant
Hell (Capricorn, 2005).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All
rights reserved.
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http://www.alternet.org/story/86358/ |
