A defense of Rushdie’s knighthood

Not everyone is against the Rushdie knighthood. Ron Liddle of the Guardian writes:

Like most haggard and tired former commies, I have little time for the honours system; it’s an infantile, reflexive thing on my part, I suppose. Certainly I will be the first to show up with my bucket of ordure when some tenth-rate, brain-dead pop star or footballer or soap actor has a medal pinned on him out of the government’s desire to kowtow to public sensibilities. But if we are to have the honours, I find it difficult to think of anyone more deserving of a knighthood than Sir Salman Rushdie. While the rest of us were still worrying about the Cold War, Rushdie was warning us about the war yet to come. He addressed the Islamic revolution with sophistication, philosophical elegance and great literary inventiveness. And he did so with enormous courage and candour. He is perhaps Britain’s only writer who has successfully examined the soul of Islam and, in so doing, examined the soul of the West too. Despite the misery of his peripatetic incarceration he has produced at least five first-class novels or collections of stories…

What this points to is the utter absurdity of knighthood as it now exists in Britain—“Sir” Elton John! Once divorced from service to king and country and remade into a culture award, even a pop culture award, it is no different from any other culture award in today’s self-regarding, left-wing culture, like the Pulitzer or the Grammy or the Emmy. Moreover the queen has nothing to do with it. Various committees make recommendations to the prime minister, and he invariably does what they recommend. The British should either return knighthood to a semblance of traditional knightood, a recognition, by the queen (not the prime minister) for some actual public service, or they should drop it altogether.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 24, 2007 09:39 AM | Send