Terry Eagleton v. Martin Amis/Barack Obama is a fabricator and you must not vote for him.

Martin Amis has been given a position at the University of Manchester, teaching Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov, whose influence Amis has boringly worn on his sleeve for two decades. Manchester also happens to be Terry Eagleton's employer. To add to this, Eagleton has taken the opportunity, in a new Preface to his classic Ideology: An Introduction (reprinted by Verso this year) to take Martin Amis to task for his unabashedly reactionary turn following September 11, as well as to point out that Amis the Younger seems to be inheriting the most xenophobic and idiotic traits that his father, Kingsley, ever exhibited.

We are of the mind that both Amises have written, between them, at least two good novels (chronologically, Lucky Jim and London Fields). Yet Amis the Younger's war-mongering turn in recent years is thoroughly inexcusable, not to mention patently racist. In a quote that could have been come straight from the mouth of Christopher Hitchens (who has also, as we're sure you're aware, gone off the deep end in the past decade), novelist Martin Amis offered this answer to a question about whether his creative writing courses would have a particular theme: "If all this does turn out to have a theme, it'll be, "Don't go with the crowd, don't do anything for the crowd, don't be of the crowd or with the crowd." Yet Amis is fooling no one. An apt slogan for the corruption of critical thinking, this quotation could be the motto of a particularly unpalatable contrarian attitude by which the likes of Amis and Hitchens justify their newfound reactionary sensibilities in the wake of 9-11. If Terry Eagleton and Martin Amis do end up in a hallway scuffle at the University of Manchester, we at No Empires know which of the two we'll be rooting for.

Echoing the first-ever No Empires post, No Empires still hates Barack Obama. We'll leave you with an excerpt from an article by Paul Street on America's most accessible black man; yet also its most dangerous, as he seems willing to ignore the entire miserable history of white supremacism and the black experience in America:

In Selma, Alabama last March, Obama claimed that the Civil Rights Movement's heroic struggles in Selma (site of a famous 1965 voting rights march) and Birmingham (home to an epic 1963 desegregation battle) sent out ripples of socially progressive change that permitted his black father (Barack Obama, Sr.) and white mother to "get together" and conceive "Barack Obama Jr." Behold the following incredible passage from Obama's speech at the fabled black church Brown Chapel in Selma:

"Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called, "Ripples of hope all around the world." Something happened when a bunch of women decided they were going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing somebody else's laundry, looking after somebody else's children. When men who had PhD's decided that's enough and we're going to stand up for our dignity."

"That sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son. His son, who grew up herding goats in a small village in Africa could suddenly set his sights a little higher and believe that maybe a black man in this world had a chance."

"What happened in Selma, Alabama and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House who said, "You know, we're battling Communism. How are we going to win hearts and minds all across the world? If right here in our own country, John, we're not observing the ideals set forth in our Constitution, we might be accused of being hypocrites." So the Kennedy's decided we're going to do an air lift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is."

"This young man named Barack Obama [Sr.] got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me."

Too bad Obama was born four years before the Selma struggle in the relatively multicultural island state of Hawaii, where there was nothing all that shocking about a white woman marrying a graduate student from Kenya!

I cannot explain the line about "men who had Ph.D's.