From: Vivian Droptrou
Category: Amis
Date: 7/31/99
Time: 5:07:18 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.96
*GHASTLY GALLERY OF ENGLAND HATERS* / BY TAKI
*The New Yorker* recently published a short story by the very short Martin Amis, portentously entitled *State of England*. Although I have been known to poke fun at the English, this made me a little uncomfortable. Amis is the last person to gripe about England. He is a gimmicky writer, a self-publicist who has contributed a lot to England's lamentable condition.
According to the gleeful *New Yorker* editors, this nation is characterised by "bad food, bad breath, bad sex, bad health, and really bad politics". When I first read it, I thought Amis was describing himself. Tina Brown, the editor, is also not one to talk. Her politics and her breath are one and the same.
She and her fellow expatriate Brits are delighted to contribute to the sniggering, condescending anti-Englishness that has become so fashionable in the Land of the Depraved in the past few years. From movies to television sitcoms to the pages of magazines like *The New Republic*, the English are portrayed as vicious, lazy freeloaders who are racist and anti-semitic.
How else is one to explain the extraordinary welcome that greeted Gerry Adams. The Draft Dodger clinked glasses with him, interviewers outdid one another in abasing themselves before him; newspapers could not allocate too much space to slobbering profiles.
After all, Roman Catholics are not exactly the favourite people of the bien pensants. They hold such unenlightened views on abortion, on homosexuality, on the sanctity of marriage. But every word Adams utters is filled with loathing for the English. This alone is what makes him so appealing to so-called "enlightened" opinion. The Unionists, on the other hand, who are no less proud of their heritage, induce feelings of revulsion. Every year spluttering, foaming, barely-controlled hysteria greet their march to commemorate a military victory achieved by an English monarch.
Just compare the record of the Irish nationalists with that of the Unionists: in 1916, while the Ulster Division was being decimated at the Somme, the Irish nationalists were receiving money and arms from the Germans to mount an anti-English insurrection in Dublin. During the second world war, the Irish refused, in the name of neutrality, to allow their ports and airspace to be used by the British; and it was "the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland"---to which Churchill pointedly referred in his victory broadcast---which made up for it. The future Irish prime minister, Charles Haughey, who makes Bill Clinton seem the epitome of candour, publicly burnt the Union Jack on VE-Day. The IRA co-operated with the Nazis throughout the war.
[BLAH BLAH BLAH. FOLLOWED BY CONTINUED MICK-BASHING WHICH I DELETED.]
The imperialists may have been highhanded with the "wogs", but they respected the differences between the people over whom they ruled. The liberals who took over from them created new states based on ideology. It has produced non-stop killing.
Amis, take your bad breath and your American broad and move to Hollywood, where you belong.
[From *The Times* of London. July 21, 1996.]