Murdering Americans (17 page)

‘Oreo?’

‘It’s a black cookie that’s white on the inside.’

‘Got you. I’ve a black friend in the UK who gets called a coconut.’

‘I’ve been called that too.’ Mark stood up and began to pace up and down. ‘I’m an American. Period. Massa ain’t going to tell me what to think just because of the colour of my skin. Being black makes me no better or worse than if I was white and I’m humiliated by the fact that lots of people will think that anything I achieve, any job I get, is because of positive discrimination. What do these fucking PC crap-merchants think they’re doing? All their stupid rules and quotas and programmes do far more damage to the people they’re supposed to help than they do to the people they’re supposed to harm. I want them abolished in education and in the job market. I want people to think blacks are as good as whites so should be treated equally. And now I’m prepared to get thrown out of college if I can help that struggle. Me and Ryan and Sue-Ellen and Joshua, we’re fed up with being pushed around.’

***

‘The Axis survivors are very cross,’ said the baroness. ‘The Dean—or Acting Provost as I must learn to think of her—was almost incoherent with rage just at the sight of me. She started on about the harassment charges against me and when I said I’d fight them to the bitter end, she nearly exploded. Screamed at me that I needed gender, ethnic, and sensitivity training. She seems to have got very upset about a compliment I paid someone.’

‘Explain.’

‘That girl who said I’d put an inappropriate hand on her arm or whatever rubbish it was took exception to my saying I’d be grateful if she’d move her hottentottybotty out of the way.’

‘Her what?’

‘She had one of those attractive big African bottoms which scientists, I pointed out to Acting Provost Half-wit, had first observed on Hottentots in the early nineteenth century. She couldn’t seem to grasp it, just yelled a lot. The President then tried to be mollifying and asked if in view of the Provost and the Goon’s tragic deaths wouldn’t I be prepared to help restore calm to the campus by considering my position?’

‘Which means what?’

‘Agree to go home. They seem to have decided they’d be better off this term without the DVPs, and Constance Darlington and Rowley Cunningham are packing their bags, though Rawlings is hanging in there. I’ve been offered a big bribe just to bugger off. Something in the region of fifty thousand bucks to compensate me for the inconvenience. Naturally, if they really really want me to go that much, I’ll stay. I explained that I was an old-fashioned woman who believed in honouring contracts and that Helen’s sad death made me even more determined to see it through. I could hardly be expected, I said, to feel bereaved at the death of the thug Gonzales, whom I had reason to believe was trying to have my parrot knocked off, which is when the Acting Provost opened her mouth again. “How can you speak like that of a sociologist with a doctorate?” she bellowed. I said the discovery that he was a sociologist explained everything.’ The baroness paused. ‘I don’t think she gets jokes.’

‘Cut the crap, Jack. Are you saying you have a proper contract?’

‘I’m not an idiot, Robert. And I’d never trust an academic, knowing them as I do for the spineless and treacherous crew they are. The contract Helen and I signed before I left Cambridge was extremely detailed. That’s why Freeman is stuck with paying your fares and accommodation and even giving you a salary.’

‘For what?’

‘To teach the creative writing course Helen and I had agreed on, though you won’t actually have to teach. The Acting Provost had a fit when she heard you’d arrived: for some strange reason she believes that any friend of mine is automatically an enemy of diversity. So she said there was no room on the time-table and I said that was too bad and they’d have to pay you anyway.’

‘I like the idea of the administration paying me to work full-time on trying to overthrow it.’

‘Why not? The British government paid unemployment benefit to all those IRA terrorists, even though they actually knew they were trying to murder them. Now they finance raving-mad Islamists intent on bombing the UK back into the seventh century.’

‘Calm yourself, Jack. Did you meet any resistance from the Axis, or did they cave in straightaway?’

‘Not straightaway. The Acting Provost protested loudly until shut up by the President, who made the mistake of trying to play hardball—I could be dismissed out of hand and that sort of threat. So I suggested sweetly he had a chat with Edgar Junior….’

‘Who?’

‘I told you. Edgar Brooks’ son.’

‘Sorry. Blame jet-lag. I’d forgotten your squeeze provided more than Colt 45s.’

‘He certainly does. Edgar Junior is industrial strength. The letter he wrote the Provost rejecting the harassment accusations was a scorcher. I’d had Marjorie send him a copy of the contract before I left for Slovakia and last night Edgar said Edgar Junior was primed and ready to fire any time I needed him.’

‘So what happened then?’

‘They weren’t pleased.’

‘And then?’ said Amiss. ‘Get on with it, Jack.’

‘The President asked if it was really necessary to get lawyers involved. So I said I hadn’t started the legal squabbles. They’d done that by taking those stupid complaints seriously so I said I wasn’t going to discuss it any more. I was a busy woman. If they wanted to talk, they could talk to Edgar Junior.’ She sniggered. ‘At which moment Pappas-Lott had another hissy fit and said it was typical of me to have a Mississippi lawyer and that what was more she wouldn’t be surprised if I was involved in setting up people to complain about Rawlings—or Mujaahid, as of course she called him. I responded by saying that I’d be grateful if she’d add my name to the list of complainants, since although I am a tolerant woman, I objected to Rawlings inciting excitable Islamists to commit hate crimes against me. Could I, I enquired, also make a posthumous complaint against Gonzales for master-minding the attempted murder of my parrot and malicious damage to my expensive clothing?’

‘Oh, very good, Jack.’

‘And I added that, if they didn’t ring Edgar Junior, he’d be ringing them to find out what security arrangements they were putting in place for me.’

‘And then?’

‘She said that the words Islam and murder didn’t belong in the same sentence, and I referred her to 9/11 and recommended she study the later part of Mohammed’s career closely and some of the Koran’s more blood-thirsty injunctions, so she got mad again and then I got bored and said I had to fly. So I flew. How are you getting on?’

‘Fine. Mark’s gone now, Joshua will be here in an hour or so and in the meantime, Warren Godber is giving me lunch.’

‘Tell him to stop horsing round and come on board. This is no time for fence-sitting. There’s men’s work to be done.’

Chapter Eleven

‘Obviously I’ve given the catastrophic decline of Freeman a lot of thought,’ said Warren Godber. ‘Since I was ousted as Dean, I’ve had plenty of time to read and reflect. And my conclusion is that’s there’s no hope. Not just for Freeman, but for university education in America. Which of course has appalling implications for society as a whole.’

‘Aren’t you being rather apocalyptic?’ asked Amiss, smearing mustard on his pastrami.

‘How could anyone have any hope after what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard? He was a star, brought in to take the tough decisions. His credentials were alpha plus plus. He was a brilliant academic—had become a tenured professor at Harvard at 28. As Chief Economist of the World Bank he made it his priority to invest in the education of women in developing countries. Oh, yes, and at the U.S. Treasury, he was known
inter alia
for pushing an aid package that rescued Mexico from economic collapse. He was Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, for God’s sake, so it’s not as if he could have been viewed as some kind of Republican redneck. Admittedly, he’s Jewish, and anti-Semitism—more properly called Judophobia—is rife in academia….’

‘Because?’

‘Israel, of course. But envy, mainly. Jews are too damn smart and what is more, they seem culturally programmed to revere education and work hard and they throw up intellectual troublemakers like Marx and Trotsky and Freud and Noam Chomsky. Historically, they’re always easy to blame. Mind you, more and more resentment is geared towards Indians and Chinese and Vietnamese, who are dominating science and engineering and many of the other tough subjects that the diversity wrecking crew haven’t yet had time to destroy. But they will. They are already talking up the need to teach the sciences from the points of view of various minorities. And fuzzy math, where guesswork is more important than knowledge, already ensures that at many schools you can get the grades without knowing how to solve an equation.

‘But back to Summers. Of course they try to pretend they’re not anti-Semitic, so no one said anything about Summers being Jewish, but you can bet it counted against him.’

‘What was he trying to do that made him so many enemies? Close down Black and Women’s and Queer Studies?’

‘No, though he must know that they’re intellectually contemptible. All he was trying to do—initially anyway—was to raise standards and indulge in honest debate. He had many friends in high places and plenty of students were on his side, but he was driven out anyway by an hysterical intellectual lynch mob. He was already weakened by the fuss kicked up when he tried to get some academic rigour into Black Studies, thus alienating all those who think academic research is about quantity rather than quality. Not that you can blame them. The way you get tenure these days isn’t to write anything that’s any good, but to publish more worthless, incomprehensible but modish articles in unread journals than your competitors. Or in the case of Cornel West, the Black Studies super-star with whom he fell out, you get showered with money and prestige by hamming up your blackness and playing the violin of victimhood.

‘However, it was the feminists who were Summers’ downfall. They completely lost it when he suggested—just suggested—that it might be—just might be—that genetically men were more programmed towards the sciences. To suggest any genetic differences between men and women or one race and another is, of course, a hanging offence in most academic circles. So the lynch mob got going.’

‘Didn’t he fight?’

‘Not for long. He was obviously stunned when he realised the faculty was largely against him and I guess thought that fighting would make things worse. He tried apologies. He then tried grovelling. Then he threw another fifty million dollars at the already bloated diversity budget. But none of that saved him. He had to resign. I feel for him. I thought I was a lot smarter than the people who wanted to get rid of me. But they won.’

‘I once saw Jack Troutbeck decisively triumph over a PC conspiracy at St. Martha’s.’

‘I guess she’s tougher than us yellow-bellied Yanks.’

***

‘Any news, officer?’

‘Nothing yet, ma’am.’

‘Haven’t you been rounding up the obvious suspects?’

‘How do you mean “obvious,” ma’am?’

‘Dusky, bearded, Islamist youths, of course. And burqa’d ladies.’

‘This takes time, ma’am. We’ve a policy against racial profiling….’

‘What’s racial profiling?’

‘Singling out a particular race as suspects.’

‘While I understand that you don’t want anyone’s feelings hurt, officer, you said two witnesses saw a dark, bearded youth running away from the building and several others saw a lurking person in a burqa. Two of them thought she was pregnant. And the message on the corpse was all about Allah.’

‘Yes, ma’am. But maybe they had nothing to do with the murder. We’ve appealed for them to come forward. The burqa could have been covering anyone and the young man could just have been in a hurry.’

‘Oh, fine. So you think the murderer might be an old white Islamist? Or even an Islamophobe trying to get Islamists into trouble?’

‘Could be, ma’am.’

The baroness breathed heavily. ‘I don’t want to be unreasonable, officer, but I would really rather not end up sharing a mortuary slab with Helen Fortier-Pritchardson and—even worse—Ethan Gonzales. We didn’t get on in life so I don’t think we would in death. How long before you decide that in the absence of a young dusky bearded person coming forward to prove he was innocently on the scene you might get around to looking for him? And since I can’t imagine that New Paddington is exactly heaving with burqa’d ladies, what is stopping you from having a chat with them?’

‘Even if we did the first we wouldn’t do the second, ma’am. We have an understanding with the Muslim community that we don’t talk to their womenfolk.’

‘You cannot be serious, officer.’

‘I don’t make the decisions, ma’am.’

‘Well, put me through to whoever makes the decisions round here. And don’t hang about.’

***

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Amiss to Godber, ‘is how what you might call the anti-intellectuals have become so powerful.’

‘Through political correctness, which has become institutionalised in education—and indeed in public life in general—and over-rides all principles and common sense. You’ve seen here how it works in practice. Individuality is discouraged at every turn and people are pigeon-holed according to their race, gender, and so on. In the name of diversity the number of pigeon-holes is ever-increasing and each pigeon-hole is policed by commissars who persuade and intimidate the pigeons in the hole they police into seeing a closed mind as a good mind and acting in a bloc to assert their rights vis-à-vis all the pigeons in the other holes in the cote.’

‘So when a Sue-Ellen or a Mark dissents from the received wisdom of the other pigeons in their holes….’

‘They get pecked. And if they keep dissenting, they could end up pecked to death. Or dragged from their hole and stamped on.’

Amiss’s phone rang. ‘Excuse me, Warren. Hello. Yes, Jack…yes…yes…I’m having lunch with Warren Godber…pastrami on rye…very nice, in fact, however I suspect that wasn’t what you rang about….Good Lord. Are there many there?…And what’s the theme?…Really. Yes, I see….OK, then. Keep me posted.’

He put the phone back in his pocket. ‘That was Jack Troutbeck, Warren. Interesting developments. She rang the cops to ask what progress they’d made in looking for someone meeting the description of the bearded running man and the burqa’d lady, and eventually learned that Rawlings had organised a demo in the Muslim residential area this morning and there were a few hundred still on the streets protesting noisily.’

‘About what?’

‘About the warning he gave them that the armed forces of oppression were about to storm their houses and drag innocent people off to be beaten up in cells and taken to Guantanamo Bay until they confessed to a murder they hadn’t committed. Or something like that. He claimed the police chief is a Muslim-hating Jew.’

‘Why’s Rawlings doing this?’

‘Force of habit, I suppose. Once an agitator, always an agitator. He’s an attention-seeker who I think has political ambitions back home. He’s like that black loonie in New York. What’s his name? The one who inspired
Bonfire of the Vanities
?’

‘You mean Al Sharpton, I guess. He’s not Muslim, but the rhetoric’s the same. I seem to remember him succeeding in having a Jewish shop-keeper burned out.’

‘Jack says the demo seems to have paralysed the cops both in HQ and on the streets, from what she can see. She’s watching it covertly from a car at the moment.’

‘It could be more the District Attorney that’s paralysed. He’s coming up for election soon and he won’t want trouble. Though I can’t see how he can avoid it.’ Godber shrugged. ‘People have no balls. They let themselves get walked over. I’ve done the same. You fight and fight and finally one day you wake up and find you don’t care any more.’ He took a bite of a gherkin. ‘Multiculturalism is destroying our educational system and in my view the intellectual and bureaucratic establishment that has brainwashed generations into accepting it as an unchallengeable good won’t rest until they’ve destroyed the United States. And then the whole of the West.’

He smiled benignly. ‘I used to get very agitated about all this, but now I understand what’s going on, I don’t get mad any more. There’s no point in getting worked up about the inevitable. All nations and civilisations die.’

Amiss finished his sandwich and took a quick gulp of coffee. ‘You may have accepted the inevitable, but give me time before I succumb. Why would Americans want to destroy the United States? I thought all the flag-flying and pledging allegiance and singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” begins at primary school and produces patriots.’

Godber put his hands behind his head and leaned back in the kitchen chair. ‘In any society there’s an enemy within. During the Cold War it was communists, but there were very few of them and society watched out for them suspiciously. Now, it’s different. You see, those who want to bring down this country are like Mao’s guerrillas—fish swimming in a friendly sea.’

‘You’re saying the great American public want revolution, so they’ll give succour to those who foment it?’

‘No, no. The average American wants nothing of the sort, but he spends his time making his living and worrying about his family and watching baseball and eating hamburgers and doesn’t think much about society, so he doesn’t realise what’s going on. I often think that if parents really knew the truth about universities—the sneering at patriotism, religion, and core American values—they’d march on the campuses and rescue their children. But they don’t know what’s going on because the media—like education—is dominated by the liberal PC left, so the average American is constantly told that university professors are fine people and American education is the best in the world. All he wants is for his kid to come out of university with the right piece of paper and get a good job. He’s certainly not going to complain that the kid’s not being pushed hard enough.’

‘Is it a left-right thing?’

‘Not entirely. Many of the liberal left will be appalled if we end up the way we seem to be heading, but most of them have so bought into the PC view of the universe that they don’t think about anything but the importance of achieving equality through increasingly frantic and unsuccessful social engineering. Not to speak of the idea that there is no greater sin than to hurt the feelings of anyone in any of those pigeon-holes—except of course those not perceived as victims….’

‘…the white males in the huge hole….’

‘…or the Jews in one of the small ones.’

‘I’m finding all this very difficult,’ said Amiss. ‘The idea of political correctness as a threat to the state is rather a lot for me to take on. Take me through this gently. What do you think has happened?’

‘The opinion formers in the Western world—and particularly the U.S.—are being gradually intellectually coerced into first being ashamed of and then hating Western culture. Samuel Huntingdon defined multiculturalism as “a form of mono-cultural animus directed against the dominant culture”—and that’s what it is. In the U.S., what’s under attack by the massed armies of commissars is the ethos of the state bequeathed to us by our founding fathers.’

‘Which you define as…?’

‘English-speaking, infused with the spirit of the Enlightenment and with such Judeo-Christian values as the work ethic and respect for the rule of law. That’s what we’ve rubbed along with for more than two centuries, with our immigrants accepting these values, embracing the idea of the melting-pot and adding aspects of their own cultures and values to enhance the flavour of the whole dish. Now they’re being actively encouraged by our intellectual elite to reject our core values and think of themselves as aggrieved sub-groups. The introduction of the hyphen was an act of anti-American aggression. Once Hispanics aspired to being Americans. Now they’re instructed to think of themselves as Hispanic-Americans and demand the right to speak Spanish. Thus do the pigeon-holes metamorphose into ghettoes in the name of multifuckingculturalism.’ He paused. ‘I apologise for my language. I can still occasionally get cross. More coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

Godber re-filled Amiss’s mug and emptied the last of the coffee into his own. ‘You see, one of the attractions of multiculturalism and political correctness on campuses is that it’s a great leveller. An ignorant fool like my successor as Dean would be incapable of grasping or discussing real ideas, so she opts for a course of study that requires no brains and an ideology that saves her from ever having to think.’

‘Which is the attraction of all kinds of fundamentalism.’

‘Exactly. The Dean might have difficulty in defending in argument the moral relativism that underpins multiculturalism and political correctness, but fundamentalists don’t have to argue. They just obey. Her creed requires her truly to believe that there is no such thing as truth and that each culture is as valid as any other, so because she has the heart of a fanatic, it follows that she must extol all minority cultures regardless of their worth and use them to attack and undermine the dominant culture, which she believes not only has no more right to be dominant than does any other culture, but because of its past sins, has much less.