Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (10 page)

What a lovely thing it is. Peter is sitting “without in the palace.” A “damsel,” with wonderfully antique formality, “comes unto him.” She merely states that “Thou also was with Jesus of Galilee.” But the bare statement is for Peter a most terrible inquiry and challenge. It angers him. His fury, a compound of cowardice, and shame at that cowardice is in the clipped “I know not what thou sayest.”

Now, let’s see what happens when you take the Authorized Version to the body shop and let loose the monkey mechanics of
Good as New
. (I forgot to mention:
Good as New
has updated the names. Peter is such an off-putting name. In the new dispensation he is now—I am not making this up—cue the music:
Rocky
.) “Meanwhile Rocky was still sitting in the courtyard. A woman came up to him and said: ‘Haven’t I seen you with Jesus, the hero from Galilee?’ Rocky shook his head and said: ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!’”

John the Baptist is renamed The Dipper, a.k.a. The Voice; Mary Magdalene is a comfy-cute Maggie. Even the Biblical execrations are defanged. For example, the perfectly good imprecation “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” is Simonized into some 1950s-style pseudo-slang: “Take a running jump, Holy Joes, humbugs!”

Ah, Tyndale. Burning anew with a hotter flame, I suspect, martyred by zealots of bad English.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has given his seal to this gibberish. He regards it as “fully earthed.” So is compost. And he expects it to spread in “epidemic profusion.” I can’t quarrel with his metaphor: It won’t be the first time a plague of bad taste, backed up by the two Horsepersons of Witlessness and Condescension, caught the ear of a trendy time.

I’m with Peter, er, Rocky on this one: I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Samuel Johnson’s preface to his landmark
Dictionary of the English Language
is the best essay in English on English. Its great, rolling sentences, superbly chosen diction, stately rhythms, and the ever-affecting cadences of its concluding paragraphs embody the Johnsonian manner at its most powerful and most penetrating.

Who has read those last paragraphs wherein Johnson surveys his mighty labour and not been startled by the sudden, sad and beguiling personalization of the preface? First, in summing up his efforts, he writes: “It may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but
amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow: and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed.”

And then comes the turn: “I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.”

What a great style—of person and prose both—there is in that melancholy observation that “most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds,” and how much it earns from the courtesy and dignity of its saying.

I owe it to the fussbudget and increasingly ridiculous city government of New York that Johnson’s words ornament this column. The Michael Bloomberg city council is the very Mary Poppins of nanny government, with hardly a week going by without its trying to introduce new curbs on what people do, say, eat or inhale as they go about their daily lives.

The most recent was a motion by Brooklyn council-woman Darlene Mealy to place a citywide ban on the word “bitch.” I think she’s concerned about one usage of
that versatile and venerable term, the one the
Compact Oxford English Dictionary
defines rather daintily as “a woman whom one considers to be malicious or unpleasant.”

This is a good thing because there are other meanings to its noun form that should surely escape the proscribing scythe of even the most prudish puritan of political correctness—its neutral designation of a female dog being the most obvious. And then there is the unlimited semantic largesse of its adjectival and verbal variants.

Bitching, meaning to complain, is surely a term without which life in New York would be impossible, New Yorkers being universally regarded as some of the most virtuosic bitchers the world has even seen, their bitching of such energy and invention that it constitutes an unheralded art form.

In fact, what the mealy-mouthed Ms. Mealy is actually doing with her vacuous motion is bitching about a word she doesn’t like. That there are opprobrious and rude terms in the lexicon is something no one will deny. That there are opprobrious and rude terms that are sometimes directed, justly and unjustly, at women is an equally obvious axiom.

But are there any of us, who crawl here between earth and sky and then disappear into dust, who do not at some time, justly or unjustly, fall under a hail of harsh insults, crude epithets, blasphemous injunctions, obscene recommendations, vile descriptors and, in epic moments, whole anathemas of inspired and filthy objurgation? Bosses, friends and enemies, sons, daughters, parents and in-laws,
strangers and intimates—at some time or other, any or all of these let loose upon our careless heads a string of mean and vicious words, compared to which poor feeble “bitch” is a lollipop next to a vat of acid.

But we cannot pass laws to limit the expressive range of human speech. The freedom to be harsh is the cruel side of the liberty to be graceful. We can, should and do deplore demeaning and degrading language. But its restriction belongs in the territory of manners and upbringing, not in the niggardly nannyism of city hall legislation. Besides which, it is the deepest folly even to imagine that language can be suffocated by diktat.

This is what those who have read Samuel Johnson find affirmed in words as glorious as the subject has yet to find: “to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.”

He was a torturer and a sadist (the terms do not necessarily exhaust one another). He was a mass killer. Some 300,000 people died under his barbarous rule. This is the most frequently cited tabulation, but when killing reaches into the hundreds of thousands, we must remember some amount of “rounding off” is almost always inevitable.

He was sexually lawless, very likely cannibalistic, ever suspicious and vengeful, devoid of personal grace. He despoiled Uganda, and his rule was a slander on all the promise of postcolonial government in Africa. Yet, when chased out of power, he became the recipient for the rest of his miserable life of the perplexing hospitality of the Saudi government.

Idi Amin died in a hospital in Jeddah of multiple organ failure. We can hope, I suppose, that the organs that failed were his own. He was buried in Jeddah—the current administration in Uganda having correctly decided that the
country he polluted while alive should not have to bear the stain of his posthumous presence as well.

A trivial question occurs at the very beginning of any thought of the life and crimes of Idi Amin: What had this grotesque monster left undone that would have made him
persona non grata
in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Post-Uganda, he was reported to live in style, accompanied by his many wives and children and supported by a state pension from his hosts.

What virtue was the Saudi government answering when it gave harbour and support to a non-citizen who had wrecked a country, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and defiled every universal canon of civilized behaviour? Merely parroting that he was a “guest” won’t do.

But let us leave what it takes to be tossed out of the Hotel Saudi Arabia and visit an even more substantial question. General Amin left the Uganda he brought to tears and tatters in 1979—so, for something close to twenty-four years since then, this blot upon the human race passed his days in untroubled serenity, supplied with the all the requisites of the good life, to the apparent disinterest of those we have fashionably come to call the world community.

Why was Idi Amin given the bye?

More recent tyrants of comparably splendid depravity absorb the world’s liveliest attention, call forth the alert jurists of the International Criminal Court and stir lonely judges in Spain to extraordinary reaches of indictment.

Slobodan Milosevic, once the ethnic cleanser du jour, was hauled before the UN International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague while some of his victims were yet warm. The name of Augusto Pinochet could stir the streets of any number of capitals years after his rule and torture were history. Killers who keep their count low—the Carlos the Jackal type—remain newsworthy till the moment of their death or capture.

But here was Amin, truly a Caligula of our day, whose name and practices were a perfect synonym for all that is gruesome, wanton and cruel, wandering the rich streets of Jeddah and browsing the meat departments of its better supermarkets (perhaps nostalgic for the days when the selection was more mobile), not so much forgotten as disregarded.

How did he earn this right of disregard? Was it, I wonder, because there was a cast of ridiculousness in his public demeanour? Does a brute cease to horrify because he contains an admixture of the clown? One report tells the story that when he came to New York in 1975 to address the United Nations, he showed up at the Waldorf-Astoria with his own personal dancers, as well as live chickens. (These categories were possibly discrete.)

It is true that a taint of the ludicrous, or the simply lunatic, can put judgment at bay? But surely the fact, which I think is incontestable, that Mr. Amin was a buffoon does not erase his grander, more malign character as a butcher. Was it that he was one of a chain of reckless tyrants who have played
on the stage of Africa since its emergence from colonialism, the kleptocrats and dictators who have sown misery so wide and deep in that sad land, that he “merged” with a too-common phenomenon? That in a continent that housed so many tyrants, even one so
outré
and brutal didn’t stand out?

I don’t think so—yet the very recent careers of Robert Mugabe and Charles Taylor are evidence that atrocious stewardship, if out of Africa, doesn’t summon the moral revulsion that attaches to like behaviour almost anywhere else in the world.

What we can say is that some filter is at work, something that separates some tyrants from others and exempts them from the zeal to see them face some kind of justice that attaches to others.

That Mr. Amin should have gone quietly and unmolested to his grave, after the nightmare he visited upon Uganda, should be a scar upon the conscience of the world.

Commenting on the bombing of a Jewish school library in Montreal yesterday, the prime minister said, “The assault was not directed against the Jewish community of Montreal, but against all Canadians.”

I know what the prime minister meant by saying that. It’s a noble thought, that we’re all diminished by violence
and hate, that an attack on any group of Canadians for whatever reason is an attack on the civil and moral code that makes us Canadians. In the abstract, the prime minister was right, but what was the name of the school that was actually bombed? Well, it’s the United Talmud Torah School in Montreal.

The
Talmud Torah
. I cannot see how it is possible to get more Jewish, more quintessentially expressive of Jewishness, than in the combination of those two words that refer to the absolute foundational text and commentaries of the Jewish faith. So let’s be very clear: the bombing—not a word we’re used to hearing in Canada, I note in passing—was directed very particularly at the Jewish community in Montreal, at its
Jewishness
, and to walk away from its immense particularity is to diminish its very concrete outrageousness.

It wasn’t a school. It was a Jewish school, and it wasn’t
any
Jewish school, but the United Talmud Torah School. It was bombed because of its intimate identification with being Jewish. The second part of the crime was the note that accompanied it, which read that the bombing was prompted by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and that more attacks were being planned.

Now, I know that there are very strong opinions on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and with opinions as opinions, neither I nor any other Canadian can have any real problem. But there really does seem to be a tilt, that some of those who most see themselves as critics of the Israeli side of this conflict (and please note I said
some
of those) seem to think
they have some extra warrant or righteousness in how far they can go to express their detestation of Israel’s policies, its government and, by extension, of Jews.