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The Great British Dissident
Morrissey, Burchill and Amis
Morrissey, who faced accusations of racism following an interview with music paper the NME, has his say in an exclusive post on the Guardian's site.
Even though the former Smiths singer gets some good lines, one can't help but feel there is something disturbing about a grown man being so passionate about a magazine aimed at bedwetting teenagers. Perhaps Morrissey should have let his legal counsel do the talking for him - or he should have saved his breath for court, where his one-liners could have been up there with his hero's "He was a particularly plain boy -unfortunately ugly - I pitied him for it."
Morrissey mentions that other great English dissenter, Julie Burchill.
Burchill has retired from journalism and is doing volunteer work in a care home and preparing to study for a theology degree. It's worth looking back at her report on her first visit to Israel, her "nation of heroes" (2004).
On Britain: "Because, in the face of all the evidence of history, and thus in the face of logic, Britain is slowly but surely ceasing to be Britain and becoming little more than an outpost of the “European Union” — the very name, I feel, echoes the join-us-in-friendship-or-else! promise/threat of an earlier European Unity dream-turned-nightmare."
On Israel: "Israel is not without its problems — but they are problems which are a result of other countries’ ignorant and destructive instincts and actions rather than its own. Because of this, they will be easier to solve — and, crucially, they make “war-torn” Israel a far better place to be in than peaceful Britain. Israelis can at least see the bombs that go off in their country — whereas ours go off in our minds and hearts, day after day, destroying everything which was once precious to us."
We miss her. Writing of Burchill's calibre is sadly missing from the mainstream papers these days. One would expect to find individuals on the blogs, but unfortunately this isn't true. What was so thrilling about Julie Burchill's columns - apart from the laugh-out-loud humour and dazzling prose - was that she managed to be both intellectually consistent and genuinely unpredictable. You might love her work on the woman-hating mullahs of the Islamic world and their sexually inadequate apologists in the west, only to find yourself scratching your head the next day as she praised Stalin or Posh Spice. Too many blogs are as predictable as a column in The Sun or Independent. More personality, please!
While Julie Burchill has been keeping herself out of the papers, Martin Amis can't seem to avoid the headlines. The novelist is doubtless in for a second verbal stoning from the Guardian's mullahs following more incendiary remarks on Islam.
"At a debate at Manchester University, where the novelist is head of creative writing, he told a packed auditorium that only a machine would not have experienced "retaliatory urges" upon learning in August last year of the alleged plot to bomb transatlantic aircraft, in which, Amis said, 3,000 people could have died," the newspaper reports,
"There should be from every corner of the west a permanent factory siren of disgust for these actions," he told students, staff and members of the public, including Afzal Khan, the first Muslim to be lord mayor of Manchester. He acknowledged Muslim efforts "to put their house in order" were made more difficult by the jihadis' "monopoly on intimidation"."
Amis also spoke of a "distorted sympathy" towards Palestine:
"I have sympathy for Israel. It's not nothing to have six million of your number murdered in central Europe in the last century. Don't you think that this has had a psychological effect on this race or religion, or whatever you want to call the Jews?
"Palestinians have never suffered anything as remotely terrible as that. There is an inexplicable numbness about Israel."
