Murdering Americans (11 page)

Constance’s metamorphosis into the archetypal power-dressed, obedient, New Labour woman was swift. She would become one of Tony Blair’s most trusted acolytes, prepared to defend everything she had opposed in her youth: educational selection, private investment in hospitals, the authoritarian assault on civil liberties in the name of security, and the invasion of Iraq were justified by her in that prissy, reasonable tone that drove so many crazy.

It was a bitter disappointment to her when she lost her seat in the 2004 general election. She had been promised the Cabinet portfolio of Culture (a natural choice, since she despised opera, classical music, and anything else remotely elitist), but now she had to make do with becoming a peer and a Lords spokesman on constitutional reform. Even that junior ministry was taken from her when the Cabinet minister to whom she reported and whom she had hitherto outranked, decided that she was a patronising bitch and insisted she be sacked.

Constance being Constance, in telling the audience of herself she spoke in impenetrable New Labourese about a life-long commitment to radicalism, by which she explained she meant modernisation, which meant helping the young welcome challenge, seize opportunities, and feel a connection with their government. In these difficult times, what mattered most was ‘the fostering of a culture of respect in a diverse society.’

She was extremely dull. Even though she spoke for under five minutes, the audience had stopped listening and the baroness, slightly regretting the third glass of wine at lunchtime, was fighting off sleep. The applause was polite.

Rowland Cunningham wasn’t much better. An indifferent academic historian based in a university in the Midlands, in the early 1980s he had spotted a niche in the field of peace and conflict studies. Noting that owing to competition from ferociously learned and often belligerent military historians, studying conflict was much tougher than studying peace, he had elected to work on burgeoning peace processes. Being both timid and lazy, he had selected Northern Ireland as his specialism, for everyone there spoke English, it was less than an hour by plane from London, it was possible to stay well away from the danger areas, and as long as he was unremittingly pious, talked a lot about inclusivity, and always ended on a positive note, there were innumerable invitations forthcoming to make speeches, give lectures, and attend conferences in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

In recent years Cunningham had branched out into comparing the Northern Ireland peace process with its South African equivalent, which provided the opportunity for several lucrative trips to the sun; he kept well away from violent Johannesburg because of his terror of getting hurt. He made contacts rather than friends, but as he tried hard to avoid being controversial, he made few important enemies, yet many unimportant people hated him because he had an extremely bad temper which he took out on them. He had been given a rich reward for having written a few articles in glowing support of government initiatives on Northern Ireland by being given a peerage for services to peace.

What he told the Freeman audience in his sententious way made it seem as if he’d been anti-war and internationalist from the cradle. His platitudes were different from Constance Darlington’s, but they were just as platitudinous. The baroness’s chin dropped to her chest and she slept. Cunningham finished by saying that a lifetime dedicated to helping bring peace to the world had taught him how right Winston Churchill was to say ‘Jaw-jaw is always better than war-war.’ The mention of Churchill’s name jerked the baroness awake. She noticed Betsy was looking puzzled and hoped it didn’t mean she’d never heard of Churchill.

The applause was perfunctory, but Jimmy Rawlings soon woke everyone up. ‘I don’t want to be called Jimmy Rawlings, brothers and sisters,’ he announced. ‘I want to be called Mujaahid, which means a fighter for Allah, not a fighter exploited by boxing promoters. Just like the great Muhammad Ali, brothers and sisters, I saw the light and gave myself to Allah.’ There was a wild cheer from the back.

A retired boxer who had discovered that rabble-rousing was more lucrative than commenting on his old sport, Rawlings told a compelling if somewhat exaggerated story of a poverty-stricken upbringing in Bristol as the child of a white mother and a Nigerian father who had disappeared as soon as he was told of the pregnancy—never to return. Rawlings looked back on this time and realised it was the pain of living in a racist society that had driven his father away. He spoke eloquently of discrimination and bullying and the hurt of knowing his home town had been central to the slave trade. He talked of how he learned to stand up for himself with his fists, and how he got into trouble with teachers. And then he told of the man who had seen him fighting another boy in the street and who had offered to teach them both to box.

Rawlings had become a British champion, and had come close to winning a world title, but he put down his failure to go all the way to a lack of spiritual depth, which made him seek refuge in drink and drugs and promiscuity. But then he had discovered Islam, the radical answer to war and discrimination and all manner of bad things.

For a long time, he explained, he had continued to be Jimmy Rawlings, but recently, seeing the suffering and exclusion in Britain of his co-religionists, for no reason except that they had a faith about which they cared, he had decided to change his name to show where his loyalties lay. ‘I am no longer British. I am a Muslim. I am not Jimmy. I am Mujaahid. My loyalties are with my brothers fighting in the resistance against imperialist bullying. The West must pay for its past sins.’

The audience was split. The faculty applauded enthusiastically and at length, as did a minority of the white students and a majority of the black. There were no Asians in the audience: Marjorie had explained that they dominated the faculties of science, engineering, and computing and left those in the humanities to get on with it.

‘Thank you, thank you, Mujaahid,’ said a tremulous Diane Pappas-Lott. ‘We are very moved. Now, will you share your narrative with us, Lady Troutbeck?’

‘I’m the odd one out,’ grunted the baroness. ‘I’m neither a victim nor an idealist. I run a college where people are expected to read and to think, and in politics I try to stop the barbarians taking over and destroying the traditions that made my country a force for good all over the world. Unlike Mr. Rawlings, who appears to have elected to become a traitor, I am a patriot.

‘I accept the label of radical, but I’m a conservative radical. The roots I am grasping with intent to destroy them are the shallow, poisonous roots that produce the shoots of self-pity, moral relativism, and intellectual dishonesty. I believe in intellectual rigour and robust debate, with no quarter given and no offence taken. I am in favour of diversity, but by that I mean diversity of thought, not of lobby-groups competing to win the victim-stakes.’ She folded her arms and glared at the audience. As Dean Pappas-Lott looked at her in horror, about half the student body began to cheer.

Chapter Eight

‘So how did it go?’ asked Mary Lou. ‘Are they going to run you out of town?’

‘It was odd.’

‘In what sense odd?’

‘Just odd.’

‘Jack, if you don’t give me a coherent account, I’m going to ring off this very minute. I have enough interviewing to do professionally without having to drag information out of you.’

‘Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!’ contributed Horace.

‘Whoo! Whoo! Wah! Wah! Whoo! Whoo! Wah! Wah!’ shouted the baroness. ‘Horace is getting very absent-minded, Mary Lou. He’s consistently forgetting half his lines.’

‘Wah! Wah! Wah! Wah!’

‘No, Horace. Whoo! Whoo! Wah! Wah! Whoo! Whoo! Wah! Wah!’

‘Jack! I really don’t have time to listen to parrot remedial class. Get on with it.’

‘All right. All right. I’ll cover him up.’

‘OK,’ she said, when she returned. ‘We had to introduce ourselves. Constance Darlington produced a lot of balls-aching New Labour guff, Rowley Cunningham was dreary about peace, Jimmy Rawlings projected himself as a victim who had embraced Islam because it can solve the world’s problems without conflict although since the world won’t come quietly he and his oppressed brothers have no option but to use violence. Oh, and now he’s calling himself Mujaahid, which means he kills for Allah or something similar. For the very best of reasons, of course.’

‘Including our safety and convenience, no doubt. And you?’

‘What you might expect. I called for intellectual rigour and criticised their idea of diversity.’

‘What was the reaction?’

‘Odd.’

‘How do you mean “odd”?’

‘Just odd.’

‘Jack!’

‘I don’t think anyone gave a damn about Constance or Rowley. No one asked them any questions, except for an enterprising lad who asked Rowley—a propos his quoting Churchill approvingly about jaw-jaw and war-war—if that meant Churchill had been wrong to fight Hitler. Rowley yammered about how if they’d got the jaw-jaw right at the Treaty of Versailles there wouldn’t have been a second world war to fight, but since most of them hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, he lost them. The lad attempted a follow-up question, but the dean told him he mustn’t hog the floor.

‘There were plenty wanting to ask me and the benighted Rawlings questions. I’d expected him to be popular, but I was surprised I’d had so much applause, though Marjorie wasn’t. She’d told me the students are getting increasingly conservative but I hadn’t thought it possible because of the way they dress and eat.’

‘Dubya wears lumberjack shirts and eats hamburgers.’

‘Yes. And look how unsound he’s been on free trade and public spending.’

‘Get on with the story, Jack. What did they ask?’

‘Rawlings was asked what he thought about 9/11.’

‘And?’

‘You certainly couldn’t accuse him of pussy-footing. He said he’d have been in favour of it had it been perpetrated by his Muslim brothers, but in fact it was the work of Mossad and the CIA, which was obvious since no Jews turned up to work that day, so he was against it as he’s against everything produced by the global Zionist conspiracy.’

‘Reaction?’

‘A few boos, otherwise muted apart from a crowd of fans at the back and some staff at the front, but then another student asked him if he agreed with someone called Ward Churchill when he described the Twin Tower victims as ‘“little Eichmanns.” He most certainly did agree, said Rawlings, as they were undoubtedly servants of Islamophobic capitalism. There were a lot more boos than cheers this time, but Dean Pappas-Lott told them to shut up as Freeman University was a temple of free speech, and everyone could say what they liked, so Rawlings produced a few more minutes of unfettered, nutty incendiary Islamobabble.

‘Hang on a minute. I’m going to pour myself another drink. You’ll be pleased to hear Stefano has found a brand of unsweetened tonic so I can have gin again.’

She returned, happily smacking her lips. ‘That’s better. Have you ever heard of Ward Churchill?’

‘A fraudulent anti-Semitic academic, isn’t he?’

‘Marjorie tells me he’s a Professor of Ethnic Studies who went a long way by falsely claiming to be a Red Indian but is now in trouble because he’s been proved to be a plagiarist as well as a raving lunatic. I didn’t know that at the time but I pointed out that only barking bigots denied that several hundred Jews had died on 9/11. I had a go at Rawlings and Muslims in general for being anti-Semites and then denounced all those Islamists world-wide who spread hideous anti-Jewish propaganda, upon which a faculty member jumped up to support Rawlings on the grounds that Jews were the imperialists of the Middle East. I said some things never changed and sang them a verse from that 1960s Tom Lehrer song about the asinine National Brotherhood Week.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,’ sang the baroness, ‘And the Catholics hate the Protestants/And the Hindus hate the Muslims/And everybody hates the Jews.’

‘I hope Lehrer sang it better than that.’

The baroness ignored her. ‘So I followed by asking why you could rubbish Jews but not Muslims and there was a bit of a brawl.’

‘How do you mean brawl?’

‘A few professors came in to denounce Israel. Turns out that like that crowd of academic Jew-haters back home, they’re agitating for the boycotting of Israeli academics unless they explicitly reject Zionism. So I asked them if they’d extend that to a boycott of any Muslim academics who didn’t explicitly condemn Islamic terrorism, which, I pointed out, was a rather bigger sin than the Zionist one of wanting Israel to stay in existence. They got excited.’ She snorted. ‘Academics! Even the ones I love, I hate.’

‘I know what you mean. What happened then?’

‘Rawlings got excited. A lot of people got excited. You might say the air was thick with impotent expostulation. Rawlings said all non-Muslims were infidels. I said that in many parts of the world Islam was a primitive and cruel religion which treated women and homosexuals appallingly and that if it wanted respect it was about time it caught up with the Enlightenment, endorsed the concept of freedom of speech, and stopped trying to murder people because they said boo to Mohammed. I also said that even though I was an atheist, I thought Christianity was a vastly superior religion and Western civilisation way ahead of anything Islam had to offer these days, even if it was getting far too touchy-feely-weepy-waily. “When the chips are down,” I asked the audience, “do you want freedom or theocratic barbarism?”’

‘Wow!’

‘So Rawlings said I was a wicked, white, decadent, Islamophobe, which wasn’t universally popular, judging by the boos. I must say, academic politics here certainly seems livelier than what we have at home.’

‘Get on with it, Jack. What questions did the students ask you?’

‘What I thought about diversity studies.’

‘Which was?’

‘What you might expect. I said that women’s studies, black studies, queer studies and all the rest of diversity studies were bogus disciplines designed by fifth-rate academics to politicise the humanities and institutionalise a complex system of apartheid in universities. Whenever anything is called studies, I pointed out, there’s very little study involved.’

‘Were there boos?’

‘And cheers. The Dictionary of Right-on Quotations that calls herself a Dean got very rattled at this stage and asked how I could say such a thing in Freeman, which was dedicated to diversity because it honoured everyone’s otherness, or some such garbage. I suggested she should look around the audience and the campus and see apartheid in front of her eyes. What she and people like her were doing, I said, was maximising difference when her job was to minimise it.

‘I brought in Tom Lehrer again. He has a line about how we all ought to love one another and adds “I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that.”’

‘Bad choice, I’d have thought. Americans don’t do irony much.’

‘It puzzled them, I felt. But I tried to get across the notion that enforced tolerance leads to greater intolerance. You have to go with the grain of human nature, I said to the Dean. In my college, people make friends with people they like; they’re not forcibly segregated so they hang about in black groups or white groups or Asian groups or gay groups. Unlike Freeman.

‘Rawlings then decided to help by shouting that Whitey had ruined the world with his so-called civilisation because so-called “primitive” societies were happy and peace-loving, so I said, “I see, so they never ate each other,” and he began to rave again about how I was a typical white imperialist and I pointed out that he was living in a fantasy land and that most primitive societies rarely took a day off from trying to rub each other out. So then he played the slavery card: no one should expect African-Americans to talk to Whitey considering what had been done to them, so I retorted that slavery had been practised by every race in the world, that the African slaves who ended up in America were first sold by Africans to Arabs, and that slavery in the U.S. was abolished 150 years ago and that it was about time blacks got over it.’

‘Was that popular?’

‘Very, in some quarters, but it caused a bit of an uproar in others, especially when I added that they’d be better turning their attention to doing something about Africans who were being enslaved today by Islamic Arabs in Mauritania and the Sudan. I added that American Muslims should confront their fanatics and denounce the people who were murdering Americans. Then the dean said I was undermining everything for which Freeman University stood by making such terrible and disrespectful accusations and that she was feeling the hurt, so I said that was too bad, but what else did she expect in a temple to freedom of speech. Some of the students started arguing with each other and then Rawlings got more wind in his sails and delivered himself of an outburst about why it was all an imperialist lie that Africans had sold each other and demanded that Whitey pay for slavery. He’s on the reparations bandwagon: every institution that ever had anything to do with slavery is to cough up billions forthwith.’ She laughed. ‘What’s more, he thinks Freeman should change its name. I quite like Rawlings. He adds to the general merriment.’

‘What do you mean he thinks Freeman should change its name?’

‘You’re very slow tonight, Mary Lou. Surely you grasp that it’s hurtful to remind the descendants of slaves that they once were not freemen. I did enquire how Rawlings viewed the history of white slavery, and asked from whom whites should be seeking reparation, but before he could answer the Dean completely lost her nerve and wrapped up the session double-quick in the interests of campus harmony….Oh, hang on. My mobile’s ringing.’

‘Oh, Mike, good. Did you get anything? Yes…yes…I can do that….Half-an-hour?…Fine. I’ll be waiting outside. Be on time. And bring Velda.’

‘An assignation with the shamuses?’ asked Mary Lou, when the baroness switched phones.

‘Yes. We’re going to a diner. I’m quite excited.’

‘Just spare me your complaints about the food. However, I’ve enjoyed the account of your afternoon. It sounds most entertaining. I hope the poor Dean has a good supply of smelling-salts.’

‘I certainly enjoyed myself and I think I really cut the silly cow to the quick. But I’m on a crusade now that I’ve seen the horrors of where diversity and affirmative action lead. You see the trouble is that when a moron like the Dean looks at a group of a hundred people, she doesn’t see a hundred people who agree about some things and argue about others and who benefit from exchanging ideas. Instead she searches for a hundred different agendas by encouraging people to develop grievances so they can form tiny groups and compete with the others for attention, status, and money—demanding unequal treatment in the name of equality.’ She sighed. ‘Wait a minute, Mary Lou. I have to relight my cigar.’

‘I’m surprised you’re allowed to smoke,’ said Mary Lou, when the baroness returned.

‘The fascists have banned it almost everywhere. All this passive-smoking bilge. But Stefano reclassified this as a smoking suite. Where was I?’

‘Splitting up your hundred people into competing groups.’

The baroness sighed. ‘Do you remember those simple days back when we first met and the dykes were trying to take over St. Martha’s? They were only a pressure group. In this university—and, I gather, most of American academia—all the PC crap’s so embedded it’s beyond questioning. Diversity is bigger than General Motors and has become more embedded than a fly in amber.

‘You take your hundred people. First you separate them according to race—broadly white, black, Asian, and Hispanic—then by whether they’re American or foreign. Then, Marjorie tells me, if they’re black, you have to distinguish between immigrant and colonised minorities.’

‘Huh?’

‘A Nigerian is an immigrant and obviously deserves special treatment as a black, but although he was once colonised and still is, apparently, by the oil companies, he’s not to be lumped together as a recipient of special favours with Americans of African descent because they have all manner of extra grievances and hang-ups and so get extra privileges, so now you’ve got black against black in the grant or promotion stakes.

‘Then you’ve got the gender complication. It used to be simple, but now you’re dividing people into male, female, transsexual, and transvestite, which produces competition over such great issues as lavatories. It’s a hot debate at Freeman, whether a transvestite should be in the lavatory dictated by his or her clothes or his or her genitalia. They solved the problem partly by having uni-sex lavatories, which Betsy tells me a lot of girls hate, but there’s a male transvestite who’s insisting on his right to use every lavatory on the campus regardless of designation. He also wants a gender-blind dormitory. A sub-committee is chewing anxiously over the matter as we speak.’

‘Have they considered what to do with hermaphrodites?’

‘I’ll put it to them. Now you throw in sexual orientation: straight man, straight woman, homosexual, lesbian, bisexual. Then there are the extra permutations offered by religion and disability. Oh, and of course no one can say anything critical to anyone else for fear of hurting their feelings. Unless they’re white males. Or Jewish. In which case they’re always in the wrong.’