Thursday, May 24, 2007

Andrew O'Hagan on the DNC

Here's the Ideas item I mentioned earlier. Found it via Nexis.

BIDEN BUTCHERS YEATS!
Ideas, August 22, 2004

"More garish than a Mexican funeral, the Convention floor has swaying rows of evangelical grandmothers above an action-painting of shivering flags...," writes Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan in the Aug. 19 issue of the London Review of Books, recounting his visit last month to Boston. "Everywhere you look you find yourself staring at half-chewed doughnuts and Dr. Peppers, lipstuck TV anchors and broken hot dogs, Hollywood actors and P. Diddies, a prime-time pageant of the trashy and principled."

O'Hagan, whom the literary journal Granta named one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" last year, tends to lace his journalism with belletristic references. (He claims that only Theodore Dreiser, for example, could do justice to John Kerry's "personality, the orderly force of his background, the keenness of his ambition, his moral weight and shape.") So the censorious next line of his brilliant, and otherwise partisan essay comes as no surprise: "Up on the stage, Senator Joe Biden was misquoting Yeats."

O'Hagan is right, of course. According to Biden, Yeats once "told us that the world has changed, it has changed utterly, a terrible beauty has been born." But what Yeats actually wrote, in the poem "Easter 1916," was that the pathetic, even rather laughable Irish rebels of his acquaintaince, having been martyred in the 1916 Easter Rising, had "changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born." The deep political significance, if any, of Biden's literary butcher-job O'Hagan leaves for the reader to ponder.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:39 PM

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