Barrel Strength

Reading Le Carré’s recent “The Mission Song”, and musing on moral equivalency. The poor mutt has been drifting since the evil empire popped like a balloon in the Gipper’s arthritic old mitts. He desperately lacks a new enemy, but it must be an enemy he can love, one as morally conflicted as his heroes themselves. Their conversations with foes, even the silent ones as between Smiley and Karla, are about recognizing their similarities as professionals in a lonely trade, by definition removed and isolated and elevated. Members of an exclusive and exquisitely morally troubled club.

Like Le Carré, moral relativism is ultimately snobbish. While bending over backwards to avoid classification, like the ‘bigotry of low expectations’, it really is about the exclusion of those ‘not like us’, and about stratification. Moral relativists are exam-passers, by nature authoritarian and exclusionist. Some pass, some fail. Ideological barriers are nothing to them beside the professional collegiality - and comforts - of their exam-passing, tenure-earning, essay-writing achievements. Le Carré went after big pharma in that medicine book that got made into a movie, and arms dealers in another one, I think - but there could be no dialogue with such abstract villains. It is his entire society he wishes to feel superior to, and to convey his misgivings in set-piece dialogues with the other sides’ villains. He could not personify those post-Cold War enemies and talk with them and share their doubts and misgivings. They were just big evil targets for his heroes to go around being diffident and English and rather much nicer than. (His chaps do so well at concealing their revulsion at the presence of Americans, those inconvenient and uncouth allies.)

So, moral relativism needs something to be cosily relative with - and it sure as hell can’t be militant Islam. Even Le Carré could not bring off a dialogue of his delicately sensitive Brit allusively debating a Muslim counterpart, because even Le Carré would have to concede that in such proximity to the jihadi, the Britisher would probably soon lack the tongue to talk with or indeed a head out of which to speak rot.

Reading this one is like accompanying a child on a creaky fun-house ride, knowing from the echoes ahead what soon must happen and what emotions one must share with the little one along the way. Ah well, he is a very good professional writer whose real world has grown away from him, leaving him with the interior world of a mentally narrow and emotionally stifled Englishmen politely wandering through increasingly improbable dramas.

(A little checking found this on the Penguin site. How sweetly they express his quandary of the last two decades.)

An absolutely triumphant bestseller

Absolute Friends has been hailed everywhere as the masterpiece toward which John le Carré has been building since the fall of Communism. This thrilling tale of loyalty, betrayal, and international espionage spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and uncertain new alliances alliances that aren’t always what they seem to be.‘

Jews that rush to their own destruction. Al Jazeera must be delighted to encourage this phenomenon.