I also no longer buy either the London Review of Books or The Independent (daily or Sunday). I think I should go further and stop reading spare copies of either journal. Reviewing paperbacks in the broadsheets is occasionally delegated to some emptyheaded twentysomething trustafarian, but Laurence Phelan in the Sunday Independent should be given a special prize for unselfconscious, callous, stupidity. He reviews the often contemptible London Review of Books‘s 25th anniversary anthology like this:
“The contributors’ initial responses to 9/11 are variously insightful, prescient, graceful, and provocative (‘however tactfully you dress it up, America had it coming’).”
Call me “provoked”. The nearest Phelan gets to condemning this quote is to imply that other pieces in the book are more “considered”. The massacre of thousands of innocent American civilians at the beginning of this century exposed in a terrible moment the nastiness and snobbery of this country’s political, media, and academic classes and it does so over and over again. So did Europe’s persecution of Jews in the middle of the last century and its persecution of Muslims at its end. Comments like these stink of the same blank spite and caste conformity.
Thanks
Exactly, and precisely, so!
A perfect job of encapsulating three years of anger in one sentence, if I may say so.
Well done.
While seconding all the above comments, we thought that someone should do the pedantic thing and point out the (pardonable) error in yopur post: the victims of 9/11 weren’t all Americans, but were of many different nationalities. All the more reason to regard the attack as an assault on what little there is of an international community, not just on the US; all the more reason, too, to be disgusted by people who can convince themselves that murdering office workers and other civilians can possibly be justified as any kind of political gesture.
Yesterday while I was in a very public, non-political building in central London the receptionist suddenly leapt up and turned down the volume on the TV over his desk. He then went into a rant starting with “We can’t have that, it’s Channel 4 news, telling us what to think…” It’s not just Disgusted of Blogland turning off TV or giving up the press. But I’d like to know which way round it happened – did they get worse, or did we start realising they were rubbish?
It’s a vicious circle, denawardah. They get worse in a desperate reponse to people realizing they are rubbish.
Absolutely – also stopped buying LRB after 9.11 and never will again.
On the other hand I just cannot stop myself from using their new bookshop in London which is by far the best of it’s size in the UK.
However given their astonishingly elitist stock (the fiction section is to be seen to be believed) I really can’t believe they’ll stay in business all that long….
Hear hear, Damian