Mark Steyn - Lights Out

Unlike most writers, who chose to sit this one out, Martin Amis has struggled since September 11th 2001 to find a lingo in which to mull these questions. The pen is mightier than the sword, but not if the ink you’re using is so diluted by “the ethos of relativism”. Before his descent into Steyn-hugging, Mr Amis was a famously “cool” media personality, and you get the sense that he would prefer to accommodate the tensions of our time in a voice of amused detachment – a non-“maniacal” voice, as that Newsweek guy would say. But it doesn’t seem to do the job. He writes a short story about Mohammed Atta suffering from constipation and can’t quite pull it off. He decides to decry the media shorthand for the day of infamy: “9/11”. “My principal objection to the numbers is that they are numbers,” he writes. “The solecism, that is to say, is not grammatical but moral-aesthetic — an offense against decorum; and decorum means ‘seemliness,’ which comes from soemr , ‘fitting,’ and soema , ‘to honour.’ 9/11, 7/7: who or what decided that particular acts of slaughter, particular whirlwinds of plasma and body parts, in which a random sample of the innocent is killed, maimed, or otherwise crippled in body and mind, deserve a numerical shorthand? Whom does this ‘honour’? What makes this ‘fitting’?”

Mr Amis’ objection to me is that Steyn “writes like a nutter”. But in the above passage it’s the urge to write like a non-nutter that leaves the prose mincing like a pretentious sommelier asked to bring a bottle of Baby Duck. He’s struggling to find an aspect of the situation against which he can strike a writerly pose, and it smells fake because we know that’s not what engages him about the situation. Not really. He wants to write something more primal, more visceral, more felt . But, when he does, the media call him racist.

When he reviewed my book, he felt the jokes were inappropriate. And he had a point, at least to the extent that just about the first gag, way up front in the book’s second paragraph, was at his expense. I quoted a passage of his from the Eighties, outlining his plans for coping with the impending Thatcher-Reagan nuclear Armageddon:

‘Suppose I survive,’ he fretted. ‘Suppose my eyes aren’t pouring down my face, suppose I am untouched by the hurricane of secondary missiles that all mortar, metal and glass has abruptly become: suppose all this. I shall be obliged (and it’s the last thing I feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousands-miles-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the grovelling dead. Then – God willing, if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive – I must find my wife and children and I must kill them.’

And then I added: “But the Big One never fell. And instead of killing his wife Martin Amis had to make do with divorcing her.”

Mean and petty? Yes, indeed. And I feel a bit bad about it. But a couple of pages on and I was soon cheerfully hooting and jeering at the head-hackers and clitorectomy enforcers in much the same fashion. Mr Amis felt jihadist snuff videos and the like were no laughing matter, but each of us gets through “the age of horrorism” as he can. If I didn’t laugh, I’d weep – and feel I’d already half-surrendered, for, as the late Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced, “There are no jokes in Islam.” I hope Martin Amis recovers a bit of his old drollery: He’s on the right side in this struggle and should bring the best weapon to the fight. It’s time for a great novel on the theme, a London Fields for a transformed London.

If you’d said to me in mid-2007 that in twelve months’ time I’d be a poster boy for (according to taste) either “hate” or the campaign to restore Canada’s lost liberties, I’d have roared my head off. But a year later, shortly before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal put my “flagrant Islamophobia” on trial, Michel Vonn of the BC Civil Liberties Association gave an interview to a journalism ethics bore from the Centre for Journalism Ethics at the University of British Columbia. In the course of her remarks, Ms Vonn observed: “The feeling is that it doesn’t matter which way Steyn is going to go, it’s probably going to get appealed.”

It took me a moment to realize that “Steyn” was no longer a “he” but an “it”. I used to be a writer, now I’m a case. That’s not a promotion. In this section, here’s some snapshots from the battle to recover freedom of speech in a country that so carelessly lost it:

OUR LESSON for today comes from Shirlene McGovern:

You’re entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure.

Clichés are the reflex mechanisms of speech – “Yeah, sure, it’s a free country. Everyone’s entitled to his opinion, right?” And we get so careless with them that we don’t even notice when they become obsolescent.

But Shirlene McGovern should. Because it’s her job to determine whether you – yes, you, Gordy Schmoe of 37b Hoser Crescent – are entitled to your opinions. Miss McGovern is a “human rights agent” with Alberta’s “Human Rights” Commission, and she was officially interrogating Ezra Levant as to why, in his capacity as publisher of The Western Standard , he had reproduced in his magazine the so-called “Danish cartoons”. As you’ll recall from a year or so back, these were representations of the Prophet Muhammad published in the widely unread newspaper Jyllands-Posten , but which nevertheless prompted the usual surprisingly coordinated campaign of vandalism, violence, mayhem and murder by the more excitable Muslims in various parts of the world. I doubt, had I been the editor of Jyllands-Posten , I would have published the original cartoons, because most of them weren’t terribly good. But once the drawings became an international news story it seems absurd to publish reports on the controversy without also showing what all the fuss is about. CNN did show the cartoons, but with the Prophet’s face all blurry and pixilated — the first time, I believe, that this familiar technique of investigative TV journalism has been applied not to a human being but to a, er, drawing.

Back in Jutland, the cartoonists had originally accepted the Muhammad assignment in order to test the boundaries of freedom of speech in Denmark. And they failed only insofar as the episode tested freedom’s boundaries not in Denmark, where nobody has been prosecuted; nor in the US, where CNN’s craven straddle artfully finessed the issue; nor in France, where the sole editor to publish the cartoons was subsequently fired by his boss, as is a private employer’s right; nor even at the European Union, whose commissioner for justice and security proposed a “media code” that would encourage, ah, “prudence” in the way the press covers, ahem, certain touchy subjects, but who was at least at pains to emphasize that these restraints would be “self-regulated” by the press themselves.