And Then There Was No One полностью

‘The first thing we should note,’ he argued, ‘is that in 2004 George Bush won his second Presidential election (against Senator John Kerry) by approximately 50.7% to 49.3% of all votes cast. Let us simplify these percentages by rounding them out to 50/50%, from which it follows, if we observe equally that only 60% of the eligible electorate cast a vote, that 30% of the country’s adult population voted for Bush. If, then, we agree, as surely we do, that one definition of stupidity is satisfaction at the prospect of George Bush regaining the White House despite his uniquely calamitous first term of office, then we can already state without fear of contradiction that 30% of Americans are stupid. Now let us consider that 40% of the population which did not trouble to vote in the 2004 election and assume, for the sake of the argument, the likelihood of their being divided equally for and against Bush. Clearly, by the same token, the 20% of non-voters who would have voted for him are also stupid – as are, however, the other 20% who, notwithstanding the overwhelmingly damning evidence of that first term, were too dopey or too dozy to assist in driving the idiot of the global village out of office. 30% plus 20% plus 20% equals 70%. More Americans are stupid than not. QED.’ (Is the percentage any the less among Brits? I seriously doubt it.)

In the third essay, ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Paradigm?’, he developed this theme of American stupidity, along with ‘its physically externalised symptom and symbol, ballooning American obesity’, by linking it to what he termed the country’s ‘creeping mediaevalisation’ in matters of religion and patriotism, two terms which, for so fundamentalist a national mindset, had become ‘virtual synonyms’. Let me dip in at random: ‘Were Rip Van Winkle to awaken today after a century of slumber, or even only a decade, he would be amazed to discover that the United States had meanwhile known an intellectual regression inversely commensurate with its technological progress.’ And: ‘For Americans the Star-Spangled Banner is not merely the national flag, it is the True Cross.’ And: ‘For the Bush administration the Geneva Conventions are just that, a set of conventions.’ And: ‘Yes, admittedly, they [the American people] are warm, friendly, polite, hospitable to strangers and kind to animals, none of which, alas, prevents most of them from being also just plain dumb.’

Since the next six essays were written in the same scattershot vein, the reader will appreciate my letting them pass without extended editorial comment. But to give you the gist of it: Slavorigin systematically excoriated the pernicious despotism of American foreign policy; the lawlessness of the political-military establishment, particularly in relation to its endeavours, by the illegal erasure of damning videotapes, to cover up the pet CIA technique of ‘waterboarding’ political prisoners; the sweeping aside of numberless international treaties; the ineradicable rottenness of the Republican majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as the equally ineradicable pusillanimity of the Democratic opposition; the kangaroo court of Guantánamo Bay and swinish hazing rituals of Abu Ghraib; the widespread wiretapping of telephones and interception of email messages; the neo-terroristic methodology of the entertainment industry (‘in the America of the twenty-first century,’ he wrote in one of the book’s more reckless passages, ‘pleasure has come to serve the same function as terror in Nazi Germany’, before going on to describe Disneyland as ‘that Belsen of fun’); the latent chauvinism of the nation’s intellectual elite as reflected in the many book, play and film titles to which the adjective ‘American’ is appended as a talismanic all-purpose prefix (American Gigolo, American Psycho, Harold Bloom’s ‘classic’ Emerson and the Making of the American Mind – ‘Who the Christ cares! Explain Emerson to us, yes please, Bloom, but spare us your ponderous burblings on the American Mind, whatever that is’); the religion of business and the business of religion (‘As P. T. Barnum might have said, there’s one born-again every minute’); the ubiquity of lawyers and liars; and so much more besides.

Now, that done, let’s zoom in on the gist of the gist, on the very last of the nine essays, the one which shares its title with the collection itself, ‘Out of a Clear Blue Sky’.