Too Loud a Silence
The TLS, the world's finest literary newspaper, has been strangely flat lately. It was excellent up until fairly recently. There is always the odd good piece, Stefan Collini's essays on AL Rowse and Orwell for example (not online). But lately there have been some seriously dodgy articles alongside drearily academic pieces. Outstanding has been a series of trivial, prolix articles by Clive James about Bing Crosby and The West Wing, that laughable, liberal wet-dream of US presidential power. Most recently, there's one about Michael Wood's Shakespeare documentary that, even at two-pages, fails to mention its central thesis: that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic.
But more disturbingly, there was Daniel Johnson's War is Peace, anti-German review of Sebald's recent book (see the unpublished letter I wrote to them about it) and Peter Baehr's disingenuous review of the seriously disingenuous pro-War book by Kenneth Pollack. All the more disturbing because the paper refuses to indulge in the never-defined "anti-Americanism", and is usually intellectually very rigorous.
Perhaps this dip can be traced to the new editor, Peter Stothard. He's an ex-editor of The Times itself - appointed by the US citizen Rupert Murdoch - and seems to spend a lot time on the other side of the Atlantic. He's just written a book recording the 30 days he spent in the company of that other transatlantic commuter, Tony Blair, during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. Andy Beckett's review tells us that "if you look up weapons of mass destruction in Stothard's index, you will not find a single reference." Reviewing it in the Telegraph, Tory ex-highflyer Michael Portillo says that the constant references to Blair's three-year-old son Leo smacks of manipulation and exploitation. Stothard, to his credit, does ask how Blair feels about the likely deaths of three-year-old children in Iraq as a result of his policies. He says it gets to him. Coincidentally, this week's TLS tells us that the killer of Daniel Pearl regretted the fact that Pearl never got to see his unborn child. Evidently, it got to him too. Such is the burden of power.
But "Peter Stothard" isn't his full name. It's Sir Peter Stothard. Blair's government gave him a knighthood even though Stothard admits he didn't vote for Blair in 1997. Clearly, they are two patriotic men who put aside political differences to serve their nation's interest. But which nation? I'm not saying it's necessarily the USA, but both cannot be called anti-American. That is, if supporting illegal wars, turning a blind eye to abuses of the Geneva Convention on human rights, the mass murder of civilians (including three-year-olds), the worldwide suppression of democracy and the deception of elected representatives is American.
