Friday, July 20, 2007

Oh, look.

John Gray has written another book.
Gray, a professor at the LSE who is described on the front cover as "the most important living philosopher", has had a fit of Bush-hatred spectacular even by the standards of important living philosophers. But, rather than getting it out of his system over a macrobiotic soufflé in Hampstead, the silly man has gone and built an entire theory of history around it.[...]

Perhaps aware that he is running short of neocons to man his conspiracy, Gray presses Tony Blair into service. The former Prime Minister was not only a classic neocon, we learn, but one whose mendacity bore the stamp of Soviet disinformation: an American poodle and a red under the bed. Bush, though, is not so much a slippery neocon as an old-style fundamentalist Christian whose policies are designed to hasten global warming (sound of box being ticked) and therefore the end of the world. The CIA, meanwhile, has been taken over by shape-shifting lizards telepathically controlled by the ghost of Milton Friedman.

OK, so perhaps that last sentence misrepresents Gray's argument; but Black Mass could hardly be more bonkers if it really was crawling with lizards. Although Gray is by no stretch of the imagination our most important living philosopher, he does slightly remind me of Bertrand Russell in his dotage - a clever man playing to the gallery.

But it's getting late, professor: the main actors have either left the stage or are heading for the wings, and the only people left in the gallery are a few Independent readers. Go home and sleep it off.