Chris Bertram quotes Auden in refernce to the great Hari-Cohen cage match and all out intra decency smackdown (ins and outs here). It made me think of Murray Kempton’s comment on the Hollywood Communists: and so they walked, clawing at each other, towards an open grave.
But that’s a bit pretentious, thinking on. And Johann isn’t exacty walking towards an open grave. We’re going to see young chipmunk chops getting in front of the issues of the day in the manner of a professional conscience for a good while yet, lucky us. Perhaps this from his website is more to the point of the whole exercise.
Thanks to everyone who has e-mailed in support about this row. Sorry I haven't responded to you all but I'm working my way through a pile of commissions at the moment...So how’s Nick’s diary doing, do we think? The Observer doesn’t exactly put him front and centre these days, and you can’t find his contributions to the Staggers without some heavy spadework. It’s impossible to distinguish careerism from commitment in the opinion trade, since the nature of anyone’s career within it is determined by the specific opinions they market. Opinion mongers themselves tend to cluster around specific points in the spectrum; and like so many prides of baboons, there’s always one dominant figure in line for first crack at the big juicy commissions.
For a while it seemed like Nick would be the biggest purple arse in the “conscience of the left” slot in the spectrum. “What’s Left”, aside from whatever internal merits it had, met a significant internal need: the opinion business generally had showed poor judgment over the Iraq war, and worse than that many of the people who showed better judgement were beyond the pale politically. There was, perhaps, a general need to restore credibility before the financial executives who control newspaper budgets started asking why they were paying large amounts of money to people who were both wrong and out of sympathy with so many readers and purchasers of the goods advertisers spend so much money promoting. A book which characterizes the people who were right as morally inadequate would go some way towards meeting this need.
It didn’t need to be a good book. Perhaps if the internal need had not been so pressing, then Nick would have been more careful with his facts and less willing to characterize people whose opinions differed from his as depraved or corrupt. But as things stood any old crap would do, and any old crap was duly delivered, to be greeted with a fair amount of hulaballoo. But since then, nothing. The book itself has made no discernable impact and changed nobody’s mind about anything. No-one consults it in order to get a handle on the Times We Live In. A few fans keep it in bedroom shrines and worship it at the dark of the moon, so I’ve heard, but outside such occult circles the world seems to have moved on.
But then, as time passes, a feisty young baboon called Johann detects an opportunity. His skewering of the book is enjoyable enough, though infected with a rather annoying “this is what the cool kids are thinking now” sensibility – perhaps a necessary signalling exercise for commissioning editors, but still annoying. Anyway, it would be hard to make an ill-founded criticism of Nick Cohen these days, such is his general recklesness. It’s also notable that Johann carefully occupies the ground he takes so much care evicting Nick from; having a go at the proprietor of Lenin’s tomb, carefully deploying his Iraqi acquaintances and so on: gaze upon my chubby cheeks and behold the real conscience of the left. And having snatched the foghorn, Johann’s going to be doing business at the same stall and telling the rest of us where our clear, moral duty lies. Much as I’m enjoying the general furore – and in particular the ability of Nick’s friends to bring the house down on themselves while trying to support him – this is not something I’m going to be eager to read. Still, in the meantime we have this strange lefty version of the Sweet Smell of Success to enjoy.
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