A man with the strength to give his body no strength, to reduce himself to nullity in order to get rid of everything he stood against. Sure, we can make jokes against his abstract expressionist murals. but they should not detract from the sheer paradoxical vigour of his gesture. Which was so much more than a gesture.Had there always been atheism there'd not have been prods and Celtic, Muslims and Tottenham yids, Hindus and Sikhs. France, the only civilised country outside Manhattan, got it right. It sensibly eschewed imperialism and rid itself of Algeria, in the realisation that it was prosecuting a partially holy war.
The first graffito of my life was in Lyon in 1962 it demanded that Algeria should remain French. It was presumably painted by the same pieds noirs who blew up an arcade in that city that same month: the parents of every schoolkid doing a pre-O level French exchange that spring were advised that France was on the brink of civil war so my father insisted that his nancy, already pink-shirted son should go to France rather than get diverted to Wallonia.France's censuses quit asking its citizens their religion around 1870 Britain has now adopted this impertinent practice Its schools quit teaching religion around 1905 Atheism is, maybe, a form of utopianism. But it's not an effective political instrument in this scummy country whose only worth is to produce artists and writers who write against it: how dare dried-up Margaret Thatcher write off Francis Bacon? How dare Toni Tartuffe boast and the cretin did that he has never read Martin Amis? Had he read that thrilling atheist, he might have had a better take on my country and his people But then Hitler didn't read Werfel. And Tartuffe is so astonishingly ignorant that he probably doesn't know what "unacknowledged legislator" means and would the half-daft Campbell know?The notion that when we stop believing in God we believe in anything used to strike me as Anglo-Catholic propaganda. Now it seems that Chestertonian paradox has achieved a dire literality.
The past few days I've been reading a book called Turn Off Your Mind. Its author is a former pop musician called Gary Valentine Lachman he was in Blondie 20 or so years ago He writes good. And his research into the crazier end of 1960s is sedulous, impressive, scary. He connects with the late James Webb who showed how Nazism grew out of off-centre cults and then got itself funded.
