This time, let’s look at two sketches with the same joke. The first is from the Not the Nine O’Clock News show:
The second from Saturday Night Live:
Two shows, one British, one American, with the same joke. Both aren’t that funny, but they do show a remarkable difference in approach. A difference in national comedy styles? Discuss.
I remember back in early 2002 or so reading a Guardian(?) interview with Martin Amis, in which he posed dramatically as The Novelist Who Had Lost His Faith in Novels Due to the Horrors of 9/11 and even then I thought he was a wanker. Since then he has only confirmed my opinion of him, as he has gone on his own peculiar little crusade against the Muslim menace, revealing himself as yet another bedwetter.
Now Ellis Sharp was so kind as to draw our attention to a Guardian Books article by Pankaj Mishra, which looks at how Martin Amis and other writers of his generation like Ian McEwan or Don DeLillo, have made of the September 11 attacks and its repercussions. These are writers who have said that they have been shocked awake by 9/11 into an uncertain world where what they used to believe in no longer seems relevant and who have written novels exploring this new post-9/11 world. Mishra doesn’t think they have succeeded in doing so, in honestly appreciating the effects of the September 11 attacks; comparing them unfavourably to what happened in European fiction after World War One. An interesting article. Not so much interesting, as appalling, are the quotes used at the start of the article, for their sheer pomposity and cluelessness:
Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that “We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations.” On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. “Most novelists I know,” Jay McInerney wrote in these pages, “went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.” Ian McEwan claimed in a later interview to have found it “wearisome to confront invented characters”. “I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn.” “The so-called work in progress,” Martin Amis confessed, “had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus.”
Amis went on to claim that “after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west’s rich, more protected societies.
It’s the rampant narcissism on display here that appalls me. Amis and McEwans generation of writers rose to prominence in the eighties and nineties, when there were quite a few outrages far worse than the September 11 attacks. Yet it was because the latter happened on their doorsteps so to speak that they were finally forced to pay attention, so it galls to see Amis and McEwan hold themselves up as arbiters of moral worthiness now.
Don’t worry, it’s only his Wikipedia entry that’s under threat from overzealous editors, on the grounds that he’s “non noticable”, which more and more these days is Wikipedia speak for “I never heard of him and I can’t be bothered to find out more about him”. If you look at the entry’s editing history as well, you see a pattern emerging in which the same editor first prunes it down until it’s almost worthless and then nominates it for deletion because there’s nothing interesting in the remaining article.
In all, this little kerfuffle seems to be exactly what drove Teresa Nielsen Hayden to give up on Wikipedia. The vinegar pissers are in control, the people who’d rather delete articles than create them, the
people with no humour but with an inflated sense of importance and with the time to watch Wikipedia 24/7 and gain power. Wikipedia rewards those users who dedicate themselve to doing cleanup more than it rewards users who dedicate themselves to writing articles, partially because doing cleanup gians you a lot of edits, fast, which is considered important in an user and partially because the Wikipedia culture as a whole is so wary about vandalism and abuse after the horrid experience it has gone through the past few years when it grew too large too quickly. In the process the baby got thrown out with the bathwater and it is now possible for people who literally contribute nothing but delete andnoticability notices to Wikipedia to be elected to positions of power.
The pendulum needs to swing back, to a culture more open to less serious entries you wouldn’t find in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which is less obsessed with citations and has a better grip on how to handle those parts of culture mainly found online, like James Nicoll. The first step should be death to noticability!
UPDATE: see also Irregular Webcomic.
That seems to be the message behind the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s decision not to prosecute 11 officers involved in the Menezes murder. Can’t say that this decision comes as a great surprise: from the very first the Metropolitan Police and its political masters did its best to sweep its “mistake” under the carpet, in the process slandering an innocent man. It was clear all along that nothing would ever happen to the people who helped kill Jean Charles de Menezes. Like I said last year, the police in Britain can get away with murder.
Not just the police either. The failure to punish anybody for the murder of Jean Charles, or even to take responsibility for his death, is part of a broader pattern of evasion of duty in Blair’s Britain. Blair’s government has been an unmitigated failure with everything they’ve touched, where they’ve not been criminal: just in the last week there have been the election cockups in Scotland, the revelation that MI5 had the July 7 bombers but let them go and only today there was the story that the government’s latest miracle IT system, the socalled medical training application service was rubbish and going to be scrapped. Yet few if any government ministers have had to face the consequences of such failures. At worst, it seems, they are banished to the shadows for a bit before recycled back into new jobs to fuck up, like Mandelson or Blunkett.
Don’t believe the hype. Reading the recent Europol report (PDF) on terrorism within Europe in 2006 it’s easy to see socalled Islamic terrorism is as much hype as reality:
Altogether 498 attacks were carried out in the EU in 2006.The vast majority of them resulted in
limited material damage and were not intended to kill. However, the failed attack in Germany and the foiled London plot demonstrate that Islamist terrorists also aim at mass casualties.A total of 706 individuals suspected of terrorism offences were arrested in 15 Member States in
2006. Investigations into Islamist terrorism are clearly a priority for Member States’ law enforcement as demonstrated by the number of arrested suspects reported by Member States.[…]
Along with the failed terrorist attack that took place in Germany, Denmark and the UK each
reported one attempted terrorist attack in 2006. No further information on prevented or
disrupted Islamist terrorist attacks was made available by the Member States’ law enforcement
authorities.The London airplane plot and the trolley bomb case of Germany targeted civilians and transportation infrastructure in Member States. The radicalisation process of the suspects in these cases is reported to have been rapid.
The weapon of choice of Islamist terrorists are Improvised Explosive Devices made with homemade explosives. The cases reported by the UK and Denmark involved the use of Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP), a highly volatile explosive the use of which requires a certain degree of
expertise.Half of all the terrorism arrests were related to Islamist terrorism. France, Spain, Italy and the
Netherlands had the highest number of arrests of Islamist terrorist suspects. The majority of the
arrested suspects were born in Algeria,Morocco and Tunisia and had loose affiliations to North
African terrorist groups, such as the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group and the Salafist Group
for Preaching and Combat.
Yet as the report says, Islamic terrorism is much more of a priority for various countries’ security establishments than more frequent, more mundane threats are. That’s because Islamic terrorism is sexy, is the kind of menace that gets the purse strings opens, that frightens people and hence is politically useful. Focus the population on a swarthy horde of evildoers menacing it both abroad and at home and it will pay less attention to what you are doing… As always, the security state needs its enemies to justify its existence.
As Palau said, over at the other blog: “the facts are being fixed around the policy. While our leaders ramp up the paranoia and suspicion of the Moslems in our midst and present the available data to make it appear our biggest threat is from ‘outsiders’ (thus validating the ‘war on terror’ propaganda and rhetoric we’ve been subjected to since 2001) quietly the wannabe stormtroopers on the inside are regrouping.”