Now, that done, let’s zoom in on the gist of the gist, on the very last of the nine essays, the one which shares its title with the collection itself, ‘Out of a Clear Blue Sky’.
It seems, by the way, that Slavorigin’s two initial choices of title, for the essay, not the book as a whole, were ‘Come, Friendly Planes’, a paraphrase of Betjeman’s still mildly infamous line of verse ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough’, and ‘Small Atrocity in New York – Not Many Dead’, which aped the memorable winning entry in a New Statesman competition for the most boring newspaper headline imaginable.|| Naturally, his publishers vetoed both gags as just too outrageous, although somebody somewhere nodded, for both still feature in the text itself. As he elsewhere writes, however, ‘Let us have no excessive piety in the face of individual horror, for individual horror is the supreme constant of human history.’
The thesis of the essay is, in brief (and ‘brief’ is the word, since it is by far the shortest of the collection, a mere eight pages): notwithstanding the eschatological glamour of September 11 (‘Ah, those images, how we gorged on them, how we feasted on them!’), notwithstanding the undoubted and, as Slavorigin concedes, understandable shock to the nation’s system, a shock he compares not to that of the Pearl Harbor bombing, frequently referenced in this context, but to the sinking of the Titanic and the extinction of all the plush Edwardian complacencies which sank along with it, it was, from the loftiest of overviews – I repeat, this is Slavorigin speaking – a relatively minor atrocity, boasting (his word) fewer than three thousand victims and causing the destruction of a pair of skyscrapers of scant architectural distinction, leaving scores of others intact.
What followed was an abject and disastrously ill-judged ‘poetic’ description of the event itself, from which I decline to quote. Then a few, very few, words in memory of the victims, a gesture immediately subverted by a phrase I never thought to see in a text published by a reputable house (and for letting which pass, neither diluted nor deleted, some poor copy reader who had doubtless been terrified of crossing so touchy and temperamental an author, was sacked), ‘But, after all, they were only Americans.’**
Slavorigin concluded thus: ‘For what was, I repeat, a middling massacre, on the human and urban scale alike, when compared with the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and East Timor, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in occupied Iraq itself, to have been exploited by such excrement as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and that pallid fall-guy Colin Powell, with the overt or tacit support of virtually the entire population of the United States, in order to justify the invasion of a secular country which could not conceivably have played a role in the jihadist attack on the World Trade Center – that was the true atrocity of September 11.’
It was, in short, a polemic deliberately designed to stir up controversy. Nor did the argument, indefatigably inflammatory as it was, possess any real analytical depth or sophistication. And, probably to Slavorigin’s own disappointment, the furore he had so obviously sought quite failed to materialise in the British media. Aside from a rave review from a single diehard Slavoriginite, the book received mostly mixed and muted notices from the national press, the principal criticism being of the untethered bombast of its style. It did, however, become an instant bestseller, a rare distinction for such a ragbag of undisciplined musings, and the ‘Out of a Clear Blue Sky’ essay itself was reprinted in the London Review of Books.
It was, instead, on the other side of the Atlantic that the scandal finally erupted.
Slavorigin’s American publishers wouldn’t even touch the book. It was available on Amazon, however, and soon circulated as freely as if it had been published. Naturally, in view of its author’s reputation, it took no time for the first of what would turn into a cascade of newspaper articles to hit the stands. To begin with, and for the next several weeks, these articles did not much more than acknowledge its existence and the vague disquiet which had been occasioned by its British publication. Then there came a full-frontal assault from an influential neo-con monthly published out of Washington DC, followed by another, suspiciously similar piece in the Wall Street Journal. Then, as the rumpus gathered pace, and ordinary Joe Six-Packs were gradually made conscious of the blasphemous affront to that occurrence in their country’s history which more than any other since Lincoln’s assassination had been brushed by the sacred, even moderate rags began to editorialise on its implications for the special relationship between the USA and what Slavorigin scornfully referred to as the UKA. He was savaged by the tabloids. He was denounced, absurdly, as a Twin Towers ‘denier’. Why, there was even talk of a diplomatic incident. The American ambassador in London dispatched a note to 10 Downing Street ‘in protest at this unwarranted attack on the single most tragic event in the history of the United States by a writer who has been honored by the government of our nation’s oldest and closest ally’. (This, as it happens, was slightly misleading, Slavorigin having rejected the OBE which had been offered him.) The response of Her Majesty’s Government was that, while it too regretted the intemperance of the book in question, its author had committed no crime, none at least, save possibly that of libel, added a perfidious little parenthesis, for which he could be held to account in a British court of law, and his views, however offensive, were protected by the right of free speech, that same right, note well, which Slavorigin claimed had been irreversibly undermined by Blair and his yes-men.
It was at this stage of the crisis, just as the original press coverage was petering out for want of a replenishment of new developments, that, like a spider, the Web started to spin its own web. Virtual rumours ricocheted round the blogosphere before converging on an exceptionally eccentric website, albeit one which received many more hits than most such eccentric websites. It was called For a Trans-World America and the man who apparently masterminded it, even though his identity was nowhere disclosed on the page itself, was that Howard Hughes-y individual, down to the very initials of his name, Hermann Hunt V, notorious for never venturing out of his Scottish baronial-style castle in suburban Dallas.
HHV, as he was referred to by his mythologising cronies and toadies, was by no means the self-made billionaire his trumped-up legend made him out to be. His grandfather, Hermann Hunt III, had founded the Hunt fortune in Texan oil in the fifties, a fortune that his father, whom it occurred to no one ever to call HHIV, had neither squandered nor augmented when he died of a ruptured aneurysm at the age of forty-three. While still in his twenties, HHV, coerced by family pressure to forgo youthful ambitions of becoming a writer – with, so word had it, Ayn Rand as his model – began the process of transforming what was still, relatively speaking, a mom-and-pop business into a vast tentacular corporation by diversifying, first, into real estate, then into the liquor business, then agricultural equipment, then timber and forestry, then by a natural extension, the proprietorship of a myriad of ultra-reactionary publications.†† It was whispered meanwhile that an indeterminate number of shady organisations, all of them based in the West and South-West of the country’s hinterland, that ‘mainland of madness’, as Slavorigin had dubbed it, owed their inexplicable solvency to his generous financial backing.