Evil Forces in the World

Reflections on ''Evil Forces in the World,'' as well as occasional remarks concerning ''Good Forces in the World.''

Thursday, September 26, 2002

Spectator Watch, Week II: The Irony Edition

With all due modesty, I consider myself something of an aficianado of irony; if I am not a dweller in its thirtieth-floor penthouses, then I am at least a denizen of its transit-accesible bungalow belt. I have made a zealous study of Brother Soren's The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, my Bible of all things ironic (and ironic treatise on all things Biblical); I have discoursed not only on Cleopatra and Hamlet, but on the Wife of Bath and the Nun's Priest; once upon a time, I watched Pulp Fiction entirely too often. Yet those wily Limeys at The Spectator have left me scratching my befuddled provincial pate in wonderment.

This week's issue opens with a clarion call to neo-imperialism by David Pryce-Jones. There are good reasons to prefer aspects of imperial policy to the detached, morally inept mediocrity that characterizes post-imperial departments and ministries of state, but people like Pryce-Jones take an unseemly pleasure in pointing out the upsides of colonial rule.

But what made this better was a sort of counterpoint by John Laughland called, with delightful subtlety and sophistication, "A War for Oil." Laughland follows up last week's piece on the steely determination of Iraq's Sunni Baathist elite to fight for Saddam with a profile of a Russian oligarch--whose stake in oil has helped him attain a net worth of roughly $9 billion--who warns against the war. Where will Laughland take his pacifist road show next? The North American Man-Boy Love Association? Vichy-era "civil servants"? After reading this piece, I started to wonder if Laughland wasn't dialectically promoting the war by interviewing such absurdly unsavory opponents. Hell, I was starting to come around to the pro-war position after finding out how opposed the Russian oligarchy is. My untutored American political consciousness was utterly unprepared for the devious-devising Mr. Laughland.

Even weirder is an article (apparently) praising Gerhardt Shroeder's pacificist pandering called--really--Deutschland Uber Alles. Andrew Gimson makes a reasonable, though probably absolutely false, argument that Shroeder's move was a rejection of cant and false consensus. But he also makes it sound like a recrudescence of Nazi ideology. After spending upwards of 45 minutes contemplating Mr. Laughland's curveball, this article necessitated an extended coffee break and a stroll around the grounds of the Art Institute. I have still not recovered equipoise.

I was finally able to relax with Leah McLaren's dissing of Norway--a country that, let's face it, has had it coming for a long time. She caused a bit of a stir in the magazine's pages some months ago by trashing British men (a group who, let's face it...well, never mind), and this is a worthy follow up. Her related gripe, writ nation-state-wide: Norway is boring. Boredom is an underused social indicator; after all, why do people leave Canada despite free health care, low crime, and soon-to-be-legal weed? I can guess at the answer, and I can say with some certainty that the legal weed will NOT help.

Anyway, she gets in some good lines at the expense of the declined land of the Norse:

There are no junkies, beggars, flash cars, club kids or alcoholic grog in sight, just these clean-living recreationalists, a couple of licensed street performers and a mob of tourists in town for a night before they embark on pre-paid fjord cruises. Everybody is trying very hard to look entertained...

What became of the goblet-smashing, damsel-screwing, sword-clanging macho imperialist drive that put Norway on the map a millennium ago? Leif Eriksson would be ashamed of these swing-dancing squares. Would Eriksson have made it to Vinland (as he called North America) well before Columbus if he'd had to pay 110 per cent tax on his boat back in the year 1000?


That last is the kind of example people like me like to say "proves too much," but it's amusing nonetheless.


Monday, September 23, 2002

CORRECTION:

A keen and tasteful observer wrote to inform me that I mistranscribed the classic Howlin' Wolf refrain in my post of September 3rd. It should have read:

That's eev-uh-uhl

in a better reflection of the Wolf's remarkable ability to stretch syllables. I regret the error.