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I've just noticed that Steven Poole of Unspeak was thinking along the same lines as me when I was giving out about Martin Amis' use the term 'functioning insantity' in his Sunday Times article about the 9/11 bombers.

To remind you gentle reader, here's what Amis said: "The spectacular attack, “the big one”, was a non-starter until the fortuitous arrival in Kandahar of the “Hamburg contingent” (Atta et al): these men were superficially Westernised, and superficially rational: possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity."

In my post I said "by attributing its motivation entirely to a state of mind, of 'funtioning insantity' of either the 'right' or 'wrong' varieties smudges the political realities behind it and generalize it as simply 'mad'".

But Poole deals with it properly: "A fascinating mini-psychodrama is packed into the phrase “functioning insanity”. With the first word, Amis glibly lays claim to clinical expertise, appealing to the sense of “functioning” used in psychiatric assessments. Yet in the very next word, manfully impatient with such bullshit, he invokes the brute, non-clinical idea of “insanity”. In lightning succession, he postures in pretension to medical authority, and then peacocks his courageous rejection of that same authority. Superficially rational, indeed."

It generated a huge number of interesting comments, the best of which to my mind was: "At least we should give Amis some credit for presenting the same type of bullshit in perfectly hard little shit nuggets".

Well, I liked it