Helmintholog

Three parties last night: a steady descent from candle-lit carols in a Nash interior at the Swedish residence, to a white-painted subterranean nightclub with great slab-sided pillars and artificial snow on the floor of the entrance tunnel—the cocaine slaughterhouse aesthetic. Some social moments and snatches of conversation:

“The thing you have to remember, Andrew, is that the Guardian is the only truly fascist paper in Britain. Understand that and you understand … everything.”

“Oh, yes: Andrew Brown. You reviewed one of my books. You called it a car crash.”

At a magazine party in the Travellers’ Club where the staff wore name tags, but the guests didn’t, being approached by a nametagged person to whom I had last spoken some years ago when she phoned me up in a fury because I had written about her husband’s jail sentence for child pornography. She joined the group I was in. I don’t know you, she said. “No”, I said; “and you’ll wish you didn’t. I’m Andrew Brown”. She left abruptly, very soon after. I can’t say I felt in the very least embarrassed. There are many awful things that one says and does at parties that leave a squirming tentacle of remorse in the brain but sticky conversations about child porn convictions quite transcend embarrassment.

And so to the last train back from Liverpool St, caught with a minute to spare: young man in a suit in that stage of drunkenness where all the small muscles of the face have gone, and a kind of long-jawed chimpanzee mask lolls on the neck; a carton of takeway curry with lots of rice splashed all over the floor by the doors to the carriage; the middle-aged man, also in a suit, who pushed past me out of the lavatory had just been copiously sick inside it. In the middle of the carriage, two jolly fat blondes in miniskirts and sombreros who looked up every time I passed them as if expecting conversation … outside, at Audley End, a hard frost and the noise of scraping windscreens carrying across the car park.

Thinking about the ignorant, angry atheists who infest the Guardian’s comment pages I realised one thing they have in common with scriptural fundamentalists: they have no idea of history. They live in an eternally dazzling present and they can’t imagine that there is anything outside it. Oh, sure, they have legends — the inquisition, the crusades, the middle ages — but within these legends the actors move, as they do in renaissance paintings, entirely in contemporary dress. There is no sense of the strangeness and difficulty of the past; no sense that many things have been tried and failed; no sense that words once meant things entirely different and possibly inexpressible now.

This is how the British intelligentsia used smugly to describe Americans as distinct from Europeans. But it is now a general vaseline across the lens of British thought.

So when our readers claim that atheists never persecute believers, this is in part an absolute ignorance of some of the basic facts of twentieth century history — what did they think was happening in Poland up until 1989? — an in part a simple reluctance to believe that history is about other people. I haven’t shot any priests, and nor has anyone I know. Ergo, atheists never persecute.

It reminds me horribly of the fundies I talked to at the Lambeth Conference in 1998, for whom the miracles of the Bible could have happened just down the road. They, too, had no sense of the intervening history, nor of any growth of knowledge in the last 2000 years. The modern atheists know, of course that there has been such a growth. But they couldn’t — outside science — give any examples at all. And even when I write “science” I may be overstating the case. How many know any chemistry or geology?

And to complete the breakdown of western civilisation, the autofocus on my camera has bust, while the manual focus has not recovered from my replacement of the focussing screen. I suppose I had better do some work instead.

I noticed over the weekend a gloomy post I had made back in August saying that Obama would certainly lose because of racism. I hoped no one else would notice. But then, this morning, I spotted the voting figures referenced on A Tiny Revolution which suggest that white racism was a huge factor: it was just outweighed by non-white racism. 43% of American whites voted for Obama; one per cent up on Gore’s figures eight years ago. But the non-white vote as grown, and was emphatically non-Republican, too.

I think we can take it as conclusive proof that God really does have a purpose for Sarah Palin. Without her, Obama might still have lost.