Ex-pat Australian & ‘recovering TV personality’ Clive James – once either the vulgarian’s brainbox or the intellectual’s bit of rough, depending on your status – had a lengthy piece in last Friday’s Independent on the subject of celebrity. It was, in fact, a transcript of a speech he delivered at the Australian Commercial Radio Conference last year. It contained all the vices & virtues that made him, in his years of ubiquity on the box, one of the most infuriating & one of the funniest of commentators on contemporary culture.
Here are two extracts from the speech. The first looks back to the Bush/Kerry debate, an event either so deeply sad that a humorous take would be entirely inappropriate, or so intrinsically farcical that the application of humour would simply be redundant. These reflections made me laugh a lot.
I was in New York the weekend before last, having arrived just in time for the first debate between Bush & Kerry. Watching the debate with a deepening sense of awe, I thought: there is the spectacle of the two most highly qualified men in a great office, and then there is this. It wasn’t surprising that Kerry was generally thought to halve won the contest. Being more articulate than George W. Bush is no challenge. So is my cat. In the debate, Bush once again proved that it is too early in America’s history to have a president for whom English is not his first language. Once again you could see the truth of the remark…that the British prime minister Tony Blair’s great advantage as a world statesman is his gift for putting President Bush’s thoughts into words. It's even possible that President Bush has no thoughts at all, only emotions. When he searches for a word, he feels fear, & his face shows it. When he finds one, he feels triumph, & his face shows that. Almost always, the word he finds is the wrong one, but his look of relief arouses sympathy in the audience, as when a child, sent to fetch a spoon from the kitchen drawer, comes back with a fork. I was especially sympathetic when he announced that the ‘group of folks’, by which he meant the insurgents in Iraq, were fighting us ‘vociferously’: ‘that’s why they’re fighting so vociferously’. He must have meant ‘viciously’ or perhaps ‘ferociously’, but he could scarcely have meant ‘vociferously’. If all that the insurgents were doing was shouting loudly they would be less of a problem. But Bush’s premature senile aphasia wasn’t the real story of the debate. The real story was that Kerry, even with his opponent disappearing into a semantic black holed, still managed to win only by a hair.
The second extract is a brief meditation on what Clive James sees as the dual aspect of the outside world’s perception of the United States. It arises clearly from a sort of baffled affection for America & Americans, but it takes no prisoners. Is it offensive? Is it funny? Is it unfair? Is it on the nail? Or any combination of these options..?
Why do Americans find the incredible plausible? Sufficient to answer that they do. In the society that began the dubious work of raising the cult of celebrity to a world-conquering ideology, the intention is taken for the deed. It’s the nicest thing about America, even if it is also the most dangerous. America is the most ritualistic society since Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns. In America, every event is a ceremony, nobody is allowed to be alone, & everyone thinks that a heart worn on the sleeve must be more sincere instead of less. The result is superabundance of courtesy. When Americans are not busy bombing the wrong village, shooting down the wrong airliner or wiping out their allies with friendly fire, they are busy being polite. The waiter really does feel it incumbent upon him, when he delivers your main course, to issue the instruction: ‘Enjoy your meal’. My sincere answer to that would be ‘Only if it’s good’, but he would call the manager if I said so. Ritual must be observed. Worse, it has only to be observed in order for to be taken as truly meant.
11:30:36 PM 
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