Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (13 page)

That the Sherman Brothers, Richard M. and Robert B., would not care to think of themselves as mechanical versificators I do not doubt. They did, however, write regularly for Walt Disney, who knew the sentimentality he wanted and kept repeating it, to the detriment of children's imaginations the world over. What I heard in the Shermans' contribution to
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
, anyway, was a musical banality that made me want to vomit, and an emotional vapidity that made me want to vomit over them.

Take ‘Me Ol' Bam-Boo', a knock 'em dead, slap it around, do it again and again song-and-dance number for men dressed in a loose-crotched ethnic olde worlde version of long johns. Quite what these ersatz morris men had to do with anything that one might call
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
's narrative or musical integrity, I have no idea. They just appeared, carrying their staves, with the sole intention, as far as I could tell, of cockneyfying the occasion. I don't think I need to remind readers of this column that cockneyfication in any of its manifestations is an abomination to us. We didn't like it when Tommy Steele or Max Bygraves did it, we like it still less when Young British Artists and Young British Telly Chefs do it, but when Americans who wouldn't know a cockney if he brained them with his ol' bam-boo do it, we are ready to go to war.

Of the host of unwarrantable cultural assumptions in this utter wasteland of a song, I draw just two to your attention. The first relates to punting on the Thames. Someone should have told the Sherman Brothers that punting on the Thames, with or without a bamboo, is the equivalent of riding your horse into a saloon on Fifth Avenue.

The second assumption is that morris dancing, as it is normally performed, is effete and needs energising. Now I happen to be a great admirer of morris dancing. Forget the real ale and the hairy polytechnical jesting; what can be marvellous about the morris dance is the fearful mockery of it, the joshing lightness of those burly men, hinting at other sorts of agility, and the rasping knowingness of the music.

As far from rural innocence as any activity could be, the morris dance teases you with its ambiguities, making your heart stop, sometimes, with its unexpected reversions to violence. Done well, the morris dance puts you in touch with the vital force of the English themselves; yet it is this, the power of their own lungs and intelligence, the depth and complexity of their own passions, that they are
prepared
to see diluted into the perky pap of ‘Me Ol' Bam-Boo'. Prepared? Reader, they stomped and roared for the joy of it.

‘What could possibly become of such a people,' Orwell asked, ‘in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells remained?' Except it wasn't Orwell who asked it, it was Lawrence. Proving that once upon a time there was more than one man who took our aesthetical degradation seriously. Never mind whether
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
inspires kids to dream, or teaches them the wrong attitudes to foreigners. The thing is ‘prolefeed': an aesthetic offence. And as Orwell showed, whoever would ruin us, ruins us aesthetically first.

Travis

If you are reading this in bed mid-morning it's unlikely you'll be making it over to Selfridges in Oxford Street in time to catch a glimpse of Travis in what Gaywired.com calls his ‘tightie-whities'. Shame. I think you'd have enjoyed it. But if it's any consolation, I'll be there.

Hard to imagine there's anyone who does not know who Travis is. But should you be living out of town, for whatever reason, there's a chance you won't have seen the poster campaign. So, for you, allow me to explain that Travis is Calvin Klein's latest underwear model and that he's been pointing his package at the rest of us – ‘package' being another term I've picked up from Gaywired.com – for weeks.

Funny old world, ours. We do what we can to rein in our appetites in public places, try not to bare our teeth when we are angry, or our behinds when we are aroused, putting distance between ourselves and the primeval forest where we originated. Civilisation, we call this: the finest tracery of etiquette and reticence, having regard to our own self-respect as upright beings, and the feelings of our fellow citizens whom we must regard as capable of embarrassments and compunctions as exquisite as our own. And yet we accept as normal a hundred thousand photographs, positioned where it is impossible to miss them, of a young man showing us his penis, or at least intimating the presence of his penis (its shape, weight, configuration) at a three-quarters diagonal slant, neither coming up nor going down, neither pendulous nor protrusive, in soft clinging cotton tightie-whities.

It could be argued that for a man of the slackie-blackie generation to have paid quite so much attention, something about the promotion must have worked. I don't doubt it. When you prick me, do I not bleed? When you hit me over the head with a club, do I not faint?

I recall visiting Perth, in Western Australia, for the first time and being unable to escape the magnetic influence of a billboard which dominated the town, partly by virtue of its size, partly by virtue of its subject – a woman unsuccessfully holding down her unruly skirts – but mainly because it said LOOK, NO KNICKERS. I am squeamish about this sort of thing. I do not care for the word knickers. Panties neither. Should some alien power wish to extract secrets out of me it would do well to forget thumbscrews or Chinese water torture, and simply order me to say knickers or panties a hundred times onstage at the London Palladium. Rather than say knickers twice, or panties once, I'd tell them everything they wanted to know and a little more besides.

My peculiar fastidiousness apart, it is impossible to take a city seriously when the only thing you see on raising your eyes to its skyline is LOOK, NO KNICKERS. Thereafter, in my estimation, Perth was forever in dishabille, a frisky, tarty little town with a bubbly personality, but only a fool would marry it.

And my fear is that Travis is doing the same to London. Forget the National Gallery, St Paul's, Westminster Abbey – welcome to Dick City. That Travis is himself an Australian only makes it worse. Not from Perth, as it happens, but from Melbourne, where civic solemnity is of no small account. It's because they won't have Travis flashing himself in Carlton or St Kilda that he's doing it here. I say ‘he' but there is a girlish look to Travis, soft pleading eyes, easily bruised skin, a waifish twist of leather (‘Find me a home, Daddy') round his swansdown neck. For reasons buried deep in its national psychology, Australia throws up this appearance of androgyny effortlessly. Take my word for it if you haven't been there, every third person in Australia is a girl with a penis.

The actress Nicole Kidman is not, to my knowledge, kitted out in this way. But she is possessed of a freckled, hoydenish demeanour which ill-suits her for half the parts she's given. Whatever else you ask an Australian woman to be, you don't ask her to be a femme fatale, not even in jest. Every time I nipped indoors to escape an eyeful of Travis last week I had the misfortune to catch snippets of Nicole Kidman on television, vamping it up for the BAFTAs in
Moulin Rouge
. Now, I have admitted to strange sensitivities in the matter of the naming of women's undergarments, but nomenclature has nothing to do with the pain I feel when I see Nicole Kidman in her Parisian stockings and suspenders. Few sights on this planet are sadder – not a wounded elephant, not a tiger cub separated from its mother – than a woman who does not fill or look seductive in a stocking. No time here to plumb the mysteries of it; whether it comes down to actual fleshliness, the voluptuous swell of thigh (or not), or simply to consciousness of sensuality (or not): the fact remains that some women can and some can't, and those who can't are desolating when they try.

I wish they'd ask me first. I wish that middle-aged lady novelist with a trampy name had asked me how she looked in fishnets before letting the newspapers snap her in them, extended on a chaise longue. ‘Heart-breaking,' I'd have told her. But then fishnets become no one. In fishnets a woman only ever resembles a fish.

And tightie-whities are no better. Down to our drawers, we are all pathetic. If I'm killed in the crush to see Travis, I'll admit I'm mistaken.

Loving the Inchoate

Lovely word, inchoate. Meaning incipient, barely begun, rudimentary, immature. Like Estelle Morris, who I'll come to anon. I introduce the word – inchoate, not Morris – without ceremony on the assumption that you've been reaching for it in recent weeks, or maybe months, or maybe years, to describe the quality our age values above all others. I was in an argument recently as to whether we are acting the child or just acting dumb. Neither of your examples has anything to do with the child
qua
child, my interlocutors put in when I cited Channel 4 as the home of the moral infant and BBC2 as the home of the intellectual infant. What you're describing in both instances, they insisted, is simply brute, opportunistic inanity. So here's what's so useful about the word inchoate – it bridges the two positions. And maybe tempers both with compassion, for that which is inchoate might be said to be struggling towards something better, like BBC2 with its use of words like ‘book'. Look, Mummy, book!

All of it, of course, whether in politics or the media or art, is just a variation of
nostalgie de la boue
, the yearning of civilised man to return to the condition of being uncivilised. Which is another reason I favour inchoate. You can hear the mud in it.

I take it as read myself that the glorification of the suicide bomber by normally peaceable people, people who are appalled by the yobs who throw peanuts at an illusionist, is actually glorification of the inchoate made active. That a suicide bomber might have a degree in sociology or racial hatred does not make her, or him, a jot less rudimentary. For it is a rudimentary response to events, however you interpret those events, to turn yourself into human explosive and once and for all close down argument in the act of blowing away as many other people as you can. It is psychologically retarded, an introjection of a grievance and a projection of your selfish will. It is not just the end of life, it is the end of the
idea
of life.

Whenever I voice this conviction, peaceably, I am bombarded by letters in little envelopes from, I suspect, widowed ladies usually living in Leicestershire. What they have to tell me is invariably the same. Suicide bombing is a legitimate defence against the new Nazis, the Israelis. Now I know, because I have been told enough times, that it is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel, but the gratuitous use of the word Nazi always does seem anti-Semitic to me (since there are many other less emotionally loaded but equally brutal and militaristic nouns we might use), as does the frequent recourse, in such little letters, to the subject of Hebraic genes. Might I be entitled to accuse of anti-Semitism those who put all our misfortunes down to some kink in the Jewish genome?

Anti-Semitism, too, it has always seemed to me, is yet another branch of devotion to the inchoate. Sartre said that the anti-Semite wanted to make himself as stone; I think the anti-Semite wants to make himself as mud. What the hater of the Jew fears above all else is articulacy, the Jewish project of giving voice to the reasons of belief, to codification of the law, to social justice – that latter articulateness so much despised by the democracy-despising Nietzsche – and, if you like, to the very basis on which we possess and refine our humanity. There are those who believe we can be too refined. I feel it myself, sometimes. All Jews do. It is a natural recoil of the bodily man against the mental man. Which is why Jews make better anti-Semites than anyone. But in the end you resist the suck of the inchoate or you go under. To hate is to drown; but to hate the mind for its powers of clarity, to hate lucidity of expression, to hate the strivings of language to know itself – none of which, let me make clear, do I think of as uniquely Jewish preoccupations – is to drown in mud.

But I am distracted, against my intentions. Observe the seduction of inchoateness. It maroons you in the incipient. In fact, the object of my attentions was meant to be Estelle Morris, Minister for whatever it is we call it now – Culture, Sport, Environment, Bingo, Popping Down to the Pub, Hymning Guns and Being Proud When Your Teenage Daughter Opes Her Maiden Treasure on the Telly. Estelle Morris spoke to the nation via the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week, demonstrating her bona fides as an arts and creativity person (‘a consumer, not a connoisseur', in her own words) with such exercises in bathos as, ‘Creativity is becoming acknowledged as a key driver for economic growth and public service improvement.' Which is just the sort of sentence you go to a literary festival to hear.

The burden of Estelle Morris's talk – and I choose the word carefully (burden, that is, not talk) – was the artificial distinction between excellence and access, a distinction which she would like to see ‘our museums and our galleries', and no doubt our epics and our symphonies, remove. ‘Is there an unwritten rule of life that says the more excellent a piece of art, the fewer people will be able to appreciate it?' she asked, before triumphantly refuting her own question with the closely reasoned answer, ‘Of course there isn't.'

That's the spirit of the inchoate speaking. Because actually there is such a rule, and it is determined by the fact that appreciation of a ‘piece' of art necessitates more often than not, unless it is itself inchoate, a sophistication of sensibility not to say an education of judgement which is not available to everybody. If we would have it otherwise, and I am one of those who would, then it is not for the art to stoop to the inchoate, but for the inchoate to rise to the art.