Lionel Shriver

I made a poor excuse for a Presbyterian even as a kid. I resented religious indoctrination every precious school-free Sunday. Yet despite my apostatic nature, any number of biblical tenets with broad secular application have become touchstones. Of particular value during our post-Floydian festival of flagellation is Ezekiel 18: ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.’ Ergo, while we can’t take credit for our forebears’ virtues and achievements, at least whatever horrors our ancestors got up to is not our fault.

I was in New York while the smoke from Canadian wildfires filtered over the city for three days last week, and I took a guilty pleasure in the aesthetic thrill. Midday, the light assumed the roseate hue of sunset. A cloudless sky appeared overcast, and the ghostly sun was so occluded one could look straight at it. Honestly, the atmosphere of anomaly was electrifying. New Yorkers advertised their sense of snow-day exceptionalism by driving even more atrociously than usual. Despite hysterical health warnings to batten ourselves in our homes with closed windows, I played three daily hours of tennis throughout the respiratory emergency – though it was nice to have a ready excuse when I botched another cross-court forehand.

After the media bigged up the expiration of America’s Covid-era Title 42, which enabled the US to block entries into the country, the anticipated stampede across the southern border doesn’t seem to have occurred. No worries, then? Behold the miracle of social adaptation. Before the handy illegal immigrant ejection seat was retired last week, illegal entries from Mexico had risen to 11,000 per day – if sustained, more than four million per year, and that’s after 2.3 million southern border apprehensions last year. The record-breaking influx had already become a stampede, and apparently people can get used to anything.

I was asked on Tucker Carlson Tonight only once, while in New York about two years ago, and I turned the invitation from America’s most popular cable news commentator down. Did I worry that while discussing my previous Spectator column, I might put my foot in it? The subject of immigration is always a minefield. No, I believed computer modelling of the astonishingly high number of illegal immigrants really living in the US had attracted far too little press, and a sympathetic host would have given these staggering figures a wider airing.

In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’ Research is launching the free service ‘Woke Alerts’, which texts subscribers news of companies ‘putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers’. Using iconography reminiscent of adverts for those high-frequency plug-ins that ward off mice, the parent website urges shoppers tired of corporations latching onto fashionable left-wing causes to dramatise their displeasure through product boycotts. The idea is a bit goofy. Yet the app could appeal to a far more than niche market. Only 8 per cent of the US public self-identifies as far left.

Look, I realise you don’t want to read this column. I’m unenthusiastic about writing it. For most of us, any mention of Covid triggers a deep aversion and desperation to flee. Even recalling the uncanny tranquillity of the first you-know-what – the blue skies, the blazing sunshine, the serene silence in once-bustling London – makes me wince. Between the slow drip-feed of the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files and Rishi Sunak’s dubious Protocol breakthrough, most UK news consumers would have greeted last week’s headlines with a double-whammy of ‘Oh, no, not that again!’ – since the only subject that rivals Covid’s revulsion quotient for Brits is Northern Ireland. Waves of variants came and went, oblivious of state diktats.

North America’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project has released yet another list of Bad Say. Scientists are to swap ‘male’ and ‘female’ for ‘sperm-producing’ and ‘egg-producing’ – as presumably most biologists are stuck in remedial learning and haven’t yet got to the chapter explaining that humans come in only two sexes. But rather than opt for another chortle at these petty rhetorical tyrants’ expense, I’m regarding turnabout as fair play. Behold, a by no means complete list of the expressions I’m banning right back. ‘Black and brown bodies’ – a bizarrely dehumanising reduction of people to biomass, often disconcertingly employed by the very folks in possession of said black and brown bodies.

After publishing 17 books, I’m no stranger to the publicity campaign. In my no-name days, my publicist would purr that my novel’s release would be ‘review-driven’ – which decodes: ‘We don’t plan to spend a sou on your doomed, inconsequential book.’ By contrast, as we’ve seen writ large with Prince Harry’s Spare, your volume can be cast upon the public waters as not a mere object but an event. The intention is to convince book-buyers that unless they snap up a copy sharpish they’ll be caught up short at cocktail parties.