What a Cunt, I Adumbrate

Adumbrate or Advocate?   Martin Amis writes an open letter to Yasmin Alibhai Brown for her suggestion that after reading everyone's favourite last-living Marxist Terry Eagleton's comments  on this, Amis is 'with the beasts' on Muslim-hating. He may have been adumbrating not advocating, but is there another way to describe patronising and smug? Known for his writing, he was, in his day.  Bright, some people thought him.  This contributuion to thought and debate doesn't confirm either of those beliefs. But that's not my problem.

I've eschewed the word 'sexist' for many years now: I've never even been tempted to use it, but really 'patronising and smug' won't do it.  They don't get into the crevices of my reading of Amis's letter.  Sexism, as a word, is a crude and instant response to what was usually a crude and instant attitude to women. I'm after some other word that conveys what it is when in 2007 someone publicly responds to a woman making a point by hoping 'Yasmin, for your soothing hand on my brow!', suggesting 'you've been listening, rather dreamily perhaps' to Eagleton, and repeatedly using her first name.  Oh, Martin, Martin, what's the word I'm looking for?  A friend suggested 'cunt' - as in 'What a cunt', and in truth that would do it for me.  But I'm trying for a more writerly way of describing this middle-aged man's laboured tone.  There's something of the travelling salesman trying to keep his end up.  What's the word for that?  Pathetic?  Yes, pathetic.  I think that will do.   

Comments

[Seán]

You nailed him in one syllable!

[Jacqueline Cattaneo]

This entry has been picked out in 'From the Blogs' in this Saturday's (27/10/07) Guardian Review. The 'cunt' comment has been edited out...

[Steven Augustine]

On the other hand, there's a terribly important issue on the table; Amis may have bungled it with his dinosaur rhythms of wit, but at least he bloody *tried*. Cunt or not, he knows a good paradox when he sees one.

I daresay it was so much simpler when the not-nice worldview on everyone's mind was the racial apartheid of the Boers (arguably a cultural heritage): we were all *against it*, and without a mitigating quibble. Now it's the sexual apartheid of Militant Fundamentalist Muslims, it's suddenly a very "complex" issue...not "black and white" at all. Really? Why not? What's the essential difference?

Amis and Eagleton, and Amis and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, are the sideshows. Can we please discuss the elephant now?

[mastershake]

Couldn't agree more. He was decribing this 'urge' while - oh yes - 'researching' that dreadful horrorism 'essay'. So surely he should have been a bit more, ahem, clear-headed.

[Mark Thwaite]

When I think about Amis (or Hitchens come to mention it) I'm reduced to astonishment and incredulity at his idiocy. He wasn't adumbrating at all and it is disingenuous in the extreme for him to aver that he was.

[Laura]

How about 'wanker'?

[Joe]

Endless, extravagant self-dramatization.

[Paul Rayson]

Coincidentally (inevitably?), I plumped for 'cunt' to describe Martin Amis in my blog today (i read his latest interview with the Telegraph regarding the Eagleton spat).

[kathz]

That seems about right.