The evils of boredom
To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an ‘ism’. It is independence of mind – that’s all.
For the past few years, I’ve been increasingly dismayed that Martin Amis had apparently lost his edge; that his second round of hot wife and toddlers had made his wit a bunny-shaped bath sponge, and that never again would we have a chance to be glad with admiration over his thesaurus-like idiolect, the blend of low comedy, sadistic bathos and stunning erudition, his schoolboy fascination with smut, and the one-two punch of an illuminating adjective or adverb placed just so.
There is another symbiotic overlap between Islamist praxis and our own, and it is a strange and pitiable one. I mean the drastic elevation of the nonentity. In our popularity-contest culture, with its VIP ciphers and meteoric mediocrities, we understand the attractions of baseless fame – indeed, of instant and unearned immortality. To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. […] Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden – he is ever-living.
But a recent three-part essay in the Guardian on the “age of horrorism” has set things to right. While I may not agree with all his conclusions (nor, clearly, does Pankaj Mishra) it is a stunning piece of writing – and reassuring to find out that the boy’s still got it.
It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. […] The fatal turn was the American President’s all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln (‘Mission Accomplished’) – every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.
We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too – with a difference. In ‘old’ Europe, as Rumsfeld insolently called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush.
Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. ‘Stuff happens,’ he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad – the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power.
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Comment
- Yes, that 3-part essay did somewhat redeem the recent Amis, but I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that he’s back on his game. I’d put his lacklustre recent story “The last days of Muhammad Atta” (originally in the New Yorker, later the Observor) on the other side of the balance, for example…
There’s also this interview for those still trying to make up their mind.
— michael Sep 20, 5:25pm # - Oh, I agree that that short story goes in the laboured & disappointing category, and the fact that he’s friends again with Hitchens probably isn’t a good sign.
But floridly vulgarised by power ... come on.
— gail Sep 21, 9:20am # - I’m a new fan, but I just loved “floridly vulgarised…” although I think he was already that way before he got the power.
— Louis Bryan Sep 22, 5:09am # - There’s no denying Amis fils can turn a vivid phrase when he wants to. But I was delighted to read in that interview I noted above, some of the criticisms I’ve always had about his work; the phrase “I said that these particular novels made me feel as though I was trapped in a pub with a group of men making fishy-fanny jokes” for example. And her quoting (and agreeing with) another critic who’d stated that “his books lack real emotional bite; we do not care what happens in them. You can open an Amis novel at any point and be mesmerised by the sentences and paragraphs (but you can still open them at any point). Like all standard lines, this is an exaggeration of the truth, but points at a real deficiency.”
Friends again with Hitchens: worrying; signs of thawing in his relationship with Julian Barnes: a better sign.
— michael Sep 22, 4:54pm # - many good communicators will exaggerate to fire up the audience with emotion and to persuade them to their side. besides it is not everyday you see the word floridly.
— modular guy Sep 25, 9:50pm #
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