In a recent piece about the experience of tagging after the British prime minister as he makes valedictory pit-stops at evocative locales (Belfast, Washington, and, alas, Basra), Martin Amis takes a pop at blogosphere critics of Tony Blair. In a tone redolent of a colonial police report on the pidgin rhetoric of native insurgents, Amis offers a sampling to demonstrate how little cognizance should be taken of uppity bloggers:

…from the semi-literate windbags of the blogosphere (“So! The poddle of Downing Street once again hear’s his masters whissel”)

It’s unclear whether the featured quote was actually discovered by Amis or fabricated by him. Given the dismissive attitude of the “old media” towards “media amateurs,” the latter decision can be easily believed.

(For example, last night’s Newsnight had a feature on the fallibility of Web 2.0’s open collaboration model. The thesis was backed up by showing Wikipedia pages on British politicians that, hilariously, featured pictures of badgers and bears rather than photos of the gurning pols themselves. A guest on the subsequent discussion, Charles Leadbeater, inconveniently pointed out that the incorrect photos were actually posted by Newsnight researchers, who had been banned from further interaction with the Wikipedia site. This seems, on the surface, like an extraordinary piece of sharp–and partisan–journalistic practice by the Newsnight team.)

Yet despite Amis’s withering scorn for the spare-room commentariat, he might have more in common with bloggers than he cares to admit. First, while bloggers operate, notoriously, without editorial guidance, famous writers such as Amis are given plenty of leeway by subs to indulge themselves. Indeed, the phrase “enough rope to hang himself” comes to mind after reading a passage such as this:

“Sit Room” is not an American contraction along the lines of fry pan, sleep pill or shave cream. Far from being the sitting room, the Sit Room is the Situation Room where, this morning, Bush and Blair and Condi and Cheney are having a video teleconference with their commanders and ambassadors in Iraq.”

Well, thanks for clearing that up, Mart.

And whereas bloggers in the Amis Weltanschauung are usually jabbering conduits for the most simplistic critiques–textual equivalents of a Steve Bell cartoon –it might also be countered that the novelist’s ventures into non-fiction and current affairs have not exactly been characterized by original thinking either.

Whether “tackling” nuclear weapons, Stalinism, or “the age of horrorism” sparked by religious terrorism, Amis’s emotional pitch often seems remarkably solipsistic, as if he were the only one really engaged with nuclear weapons, Stalinism (a bit late for outrage on this matter perhaps), and Islamic terrorism.

In contrast to novelists given prime real estate in national papers, posters in the blogosphere–with its numberless voices, rapid turnaround, and flickering limelight–are almost obliged to recognize the relative insignificance of their insights. And that’s no bad thing…