AMIS CALLS FOR EUTHANASIA BOOTHS!
Shock. Horror. Alarm. Headlines. Tea.
There’s an expression you don’t see so often at the moment, perhaps because erudition is considered a bit suspect – a sort of cheating, especially if it’s connected in some way with the nefarious frogs -
This isn’t the bourgeoisie in the sense of Marx’s economic/class analysis, exactly; this is more like ‘middle England’ – a group defined from the outside by a supposed set of prim values and a censorious moral tone. The bourgeoisie are the people of the suburban drawing room, shaking their heads and sighing over the decline of society. They’re shopkeepers and church wardens with the self-opinion of earls and presidents. They take – not undeservedly – a great deal of flack (1,2).
I can’t help but feel there’s a good-sized wallop of this going on with Martin Amis’s latest statement, and jolly amusing it’s all going to be, too. But at the same time, my heart sinks a little bit because I suspect the bourgeoisie – or rather, those people who have in some measure the attitudes ascribed to them – have evolved. The French poets who coined the phrase were in the business of shocking them out of their complacency, and it may have worked. Or not.
But here’s the trouble with outrage these days:
It’s the natural state of the modern bourgeoisie.
It may always have been, actually – what better way of invoking the classic middle Englander is there than the letters page of The Times or The Express and ‘outraged of Shrewton Sudbury”?
But the question then becomes: how do you shake into self-examination a group whose main defining category is that they’re cross because someone has shaken them? I’m not sure you can. I suspect you have to be less confrontational and more sneaky.
Not that the old way isn’t more fun.