Scott also quotes at some length another WSJ op-ed (available only to subscribers), airing Christopher Hitchens' acid-etched point of view on the same topic. Intriguingly, Hitchens is an old-style leftist himself, so his distinctly unflattering observations carry considerable heft in this sphere:
Mr. Pinter's work, according to the clumsily-phrased Nobel citation, "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Let us agree that his early plays -- he has not produced anything worth noticing since the 1960s -- do indeed show an uneasy relationship between the banal and the evil. But let me offer you a stave from a poem he wrote in January 2003, titled "God Bless America": "Here they go again,/The Yanks in their armored parade/Chanting their ballads of joy/As they gallop across the big world/Praising America's God."'Nuff said. One aspires to write such stuff, but Brit writers who spend a good deal of time consuming adult beverages in the neighborhood pub seem to have a permanent lock on the high art forms of literary snarkiness.
This, and other verses like it, were awarded the Wilfred Owen prize by a group of English judges. When re-reading Owen on "the pity of war," I invariably find that it is difficult to do so without tears. When scanning Mr. Pinter on the same subject, I cannot get to the end without the temptation either to laugh out loud or to throw up. The sheer puerility of the stuff is precisely a combination of banality with evil: a preference for dictatorship larded with obscenity and fatuity. (And scrawled, I might add, by a man who helped found the International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic.) One has had more enlightenment, and been exposed to more wit, from the walls of public lavatories, such as those featured so morbidly in Pinter's early effort "The Caretaker."
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